IMU4D: 4D Human-Object Understanding from Wearable IMUs

Understanding human activities and the objects they interact with typically relies on visual perception, yet cameras pose persistent challenges in privacy, safety, energy efficiency, and scalability. We explore an alternative: 4D perception without vision. Its goal is to recover human motion and the objects the person interacts with purely from everyday wearable sensors. For this we introduce IMU4D, a framework that repurposes large language models for non-visual spatiotemporal understanding of human-object dynamics. IMU4D uses data from a few inertial sensors from earbuds, watches, or smartphones and predicts detailed 4D human motion together with surrounding objects the person interacts with. Experiments across diverse human motion datasets and human-object datasets show that IMU4D yields more coherent and temporally stable results than SoTA cascaded pipelines, suggesting wearable motion sensors alone can support 4D understanding of human–object interactions.