Research Project

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming society by enabling advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and several areas of biomedical research. Some modern AI models have become so powerful they have been dubbed “Foundation Models.” Unfortunately, rehabilitation researchers and people with conditions that limit mobility have yet to see much benefit from modern AI, and no foundation model exists for rehabilitation. Our Center for Foundational Artificial Intelligence for Rehabilitation (the FAIR Center) will establish a vital research program to enable rehabilitation scientists to apply state-of-the-art AI to diagnose, monitor, and improve the outcomes of rehabilitation. We have created a large-scale, high-quality dataset of movements and rehabilitation outcomes, the FAIR Dataset, and tools to automatically integrate data from many research studies, which is vital for the field and the research we propose. Through our Research Project we will: 1. Develop and validate a Foundation AI model for Rehabilitation (the FAIR Model) and use the model to address important rehabilitation research questions. We will train this cutting-edge generative model using the growing FAIR Dataset, which will include data from 27,000 diverse people making 400,000 movements. 2. Enhance and validate the FAIR Model and deploy the model in a prospective study to develop an ACL injury risk score that identifies adolescent athletes at risk for injury with 90% sensitivity, along with biomechanical risk factors that predispose athletes to greater injury risk. 3. Personalize the FAIR Model and predict gait retraining effects on individuals with knee osteoarthritis. 4. Integrate a large language model with the FAIR Model and apply the model to predict surgical outcomes for children with cerebral palsy. By providing high-quality software, data, and AI models, the FAIR Center will enable collaboration of unprecedented scale between bioengineers, clinicians, computer scientists, people with lived experience with mobility-limiting conditions, and others focused on rehabilitation. Our training efforts will create a new generation of rehabilitation scientists who are fluent in the strengths and challenges of AI. Our Center will be run by a tightly integrated clinical and engineering team, enabling us to appreciate the goals of people with lived experience, recruit participants to our studies, and rapidly create and share valuable new technology. Together with the FAIR Center community, we will achieve the potential of AI to understand and improve human movement, and increase ability for people with osteoarthritis, cerebral palsy, and many other conditions.