A Novel Approach to Unravel Gait Dynamics Using Symbolic Analysis

Hypothesizing that a mere binary partition in symbolic analysis may not be sufficient to capture the dynamics in gait signals, we attempted to find how far the symbolic analysis with six partitions helps to characterize the nonlinear properties of gait signals and thereby discriminate between healthy control and neurodegenerative disordered gait signals. Differences found in the symbolic entropies of the healthy control and neurodegenerative disorder groups facilitated classification between the groups with higher accuracy. The differences found in the percentage of ordinal patterns provided a visual compact presentation to recognize the hidden variability patterns in the different gait signals.