# VersaPants: A Loose-Fitting Textile Capacitive Sensing System for Lower-Body Motion Capture

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16346 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16346/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [Physical Inertial Poser (PIP): Physics-aware Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08528/) (2022)
- [AvatarPoser: Articulated Full-Body Pose Tracking from Sparse Motion Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13784/) (2022)
- [Sparse Inertial Poser: Automatic 3D Human Pose Estimation from Sparse IMUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08014/) (2017)
- [Transformer Inertial Poser: Real-time Human Motion Reconstruction from Sparse IMUs with Simultaneous Terrain Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15720/) (2022)
- [IMUPoser: Full-Body Pose Estimation using IMUs in Phones, Watches, and Earbuds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12518/) (2023)
- [CaptAinGlove: Capacitive and Inertial Fusion-Based Glove for Real-Time on Edge Hand Gesture Recognition for Drone Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04319/) (2023)
- [Selecting the motion ground truth for loose-fitting wearables: benchmarking optical MoCap methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11881/) (2023)
- [SeamPose: Repurposing Seams as Capacitive Sensors in a Shirt for Upper-Body Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11645/) (2024)
- [MetaWearS: A Shortcut in Wearable Systems Lifecycle with Only a Few Shots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01988/) (2024)
- [FIP: Endowing Robust Motion Capture on Daily Garment by Fusing Flex and Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15058/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present VersaPants, the first loose-fitting, textile-based capacitive sensing system for lower-body motion capture, built on the open-hardware VersaSens platform. By integrating conductive textile patches and a compact acquisition unit into a pair of pants, the system reconstructs lower-body pose without compromising comfort. Unlike IMU-based systems that require user-specific fitting or camera-based methods that compromise privacy, our approach operates without fitting adjustments and preserves user privacy. VersaPants is a custom-designed smart garment featuring 6 capacitive channels per leg. We employ a lightweight Transformer-based deep learning model that maps capacitance signals to joint angles, enabling embedded implementation on edge platforms. To test our system, we collected approximately 3.7 hours of motion data from 11 participants performing 16 daily and exercise-based movements. The model achieves a mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) of 11.96 cm and a mean per-joint angle error (MPJAE) of 12.3 degrees across the hip, knee, and ankle joints, indicating the model's ability to generalize to unseen users and movements. A comparative analysis of existing textile-based deep learning architectures reveals that our model achieves competitive reconstruction performance with up to 22 times fewer parameters and 18 times fewer FLOPs, enabling real-time inference at 42 FPS on a commercial smartwatch without quantization. These results position VersaPants as a promising step toward scalable, comfortable, and embedded motion-capture solutions for fitness, healthcare, and wellbeing applications.