Science - a tale of “6 Healthy Men”

Last week I wrote about the importance and complexities of walking. This week I want to talk about representative data. As I discussed in the Tech Corner on November 19th, human variability is a challenge for developing generalized biomechanical models. But if you want to have a model that is generally representative of the human population, you would likely try to gather data on as diverse of a sample as possible, right? Unfortunately, ensuring diversity in data collection is relatively new in a lot of areas that handle human subjects - you may have seen the articles on lack of representation in clinical trials or in medical training. Biomechanics labs often rely on ‘convenience sampling’, which usually means collecting data on whomever they happen to have around. And engineering schools historically haven’t had much diversity. My lab group started calling this the “six healthy men” phenomenon, because we read so many published academic papers making broad, population-level claims based on a small sample of very similar humans. This is one of the reasons I started InStep - to build out datasets and models that reflect the diversity of the human population, ensuring that as we build the world of health outside of healthcare powered by AI, its foundation is in representation.  🧠

Range of motion by body segment with increasing speed. Navy = males, red = females. Males and females have biomechanical differences - this can't be ignored!
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237449.g002