The kinectome: A comprehensive kinematic map of human motion in health and disease

Human voluntary movement stems from the coordinated activations in space and timeof many musculoskeletal segments. However, the current methodological approachesto study human movement are still limited to the evaluation of the synergies among afew body elements. Network science can be a useful approach to describe movementas a whole and to extract features that are relevant to understanding both its complex physiology and the pathophysiology of movement disorders. Here, we proposeto represent human movement as a network (that we named the kinectome), wherenodes represent body points, and edges are defined as the correlations of the accelerations between each pair of them. We applied this framework to healthy individualsand patients with Parkinson’s disease, observing that the patients’ kinectomes display less symmetrical patterns as compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, we usedthe kinectomes to successfully identify both healthy and diseased subjects using shortgait recordings. Finally, we highlighted topological features that predict the individualclinical impairment in patients. Our results define a novel approach to study humanmovement. While deceptively simple, this approach is well-grounded, and represents apowerful tool that may be applied to a wide spectrum of frameworks