Gait analysis can convey important information about one’s physical and cognitive condition. Wearable inertial sensor systems can be used to continuously and unobtrusively assess gait during everyday activities in uncontrolled environments. An important step in the development of such systems is the processing and  analysis of the sensor data. This paper presents a symbol-based method used to detect the phases of gait and convey important dynamic information from accelerometer signals. The addition of expert knowledge substitutes the need for supervised learning techniques, rendering the system easy to interpret and easy to improve incrementally. The proposed method is compared to an approach based on peak-detection. A new symbol-based symmetry index is created and compared to a traditional temporal symmetry index and a symmetry measure based on cross-correlation. The symbol-based symmetry index exemplifies how the proposed method can extract more information from the acceleration signal than previous approaches

Movement asymmetry is one of the motor symptoms associated with Parkinson's Disease (PD). Therefore, being able to detect and measure movement symmetry is important for monitoring the patient's condition.

The present paper introduces a novel symbol based symmetry index calculated from inertial sensor data. The method is explained, evaluated and compared to six other symmetry measures. These measures were used to determine the symmetry of both upper and lower limbs during walking of 11 early-to-mid-stage PD patients and 15 control subjects. The patients included in the study showed minimal motor abnormalities according to the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS).

The symmetry indices were used to classify subjects into two different groups corresponding to PD or control. The proposed method presented high sensitivity and specificity with an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.872, 9\% greater than the second best method. The proposed method also showed an excellent Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) of 0.949, 55\% greater than the second best method. Results suggest that the proposed symmetry index is appropriate for this particular group of patients.

Symbolization of time-series has successfully been used to extract temporal patterns from experimental data. Segmentation is an unavoidable step of the symbolization process, and it may be characterized on two domains: the amplitude and the temporal domain. These two groups of methods present advantages and disadvantages each. Can their performance be estimated a priori based on signal characteristics? This paper evaluates the performance of SAX, Persist and ACA on 47 different time-series, based on signal periodicity. Results show that SAX tends to perform best on random signals whereas ACA may outperform the other methods on highly periodic signals. However, results do not support that a most adequate method may be determined a priory.

Gait analysis (GA) is an important tool in the assessment of several physical and cognitive conditions. The lack of simple and economically viable quantitative GA systems has hindered the routine clinical use of GA in many areas. As a result, patients may be receiving sub-optimal treatment. The present study introduces and evaluates measures of gait symmetry and gait normality calculated from inertial sensor data. These indices support the creation of mobile, cheap and easy to use quantitative GA systems. The proposed method was compared to measures of symmetry and normality derived from 3D kinematic data. Results show that the proposed method is well correlated to the kinematic analysis in both symmetry (r=0.84, p<0.0001) and normality (r=0.81, p<0.0001). In addition, the proposed indices can be used to classify normal from abnormal gait.

The gold standard for gait analysis, in-lab 3D motion capture, is not routinely used for clinical assessment due to limitations in availability, cost and required training. Inexpensive alternatives to quantitative gait analysis are needed to increase the its adoption. Inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes are promising tools for the development of wearable gait analysis (WGA) systems. The present study evaluates the use of a WGA system on hip-arthroplasty patients in a real clinical setting. The system provides information about gait symmetry and normality. Results show that the normality measurements are well correlated with various quantitative and qualitative measures of recovery and health status.