Ground Reaction Inertial Poser: Physics-based Human Motion Capture from Sparse IMUs and Insole Pressure Sensors

Abstract

We propose Ground Reaction Inertial Poser (GRIP), a method that reconstructs physically plausible human motion using four wearable devices. Unlike conventional IMU-only approaches, GRIP combines IMU signals with foot pressure data to capture both body dynamics and ground interactions. Furthermore, rather than relying solely on kinematic estimation, GRIP uses a digital twin of a person, in the form of a synthetic humanoid in a physics simulator, to reconstruct realistic and physically plausible motion. At its core, GRIP consists of two modules: KinematicsNet, which estimates body poses and velocities from sensor data, and DynamicsNet, which controls the humanoid in the simulator using the residual between the KinematicsNet prediction and the simulated humanoid state. To enable robust training and fair evaluation, we introduce a large-scale dataset, Pressure and Inertial Sensing for Human Motion and Interaction (PRISM), that captures diverse human motions with synchronized IMUs and insole pressure sensors. Experimental results show that GRIP outperforms existing IMU-only and IMU-pressure fusion methods across all evaluated datasets, achieving higher global pose accuracy and improved physical consistency.