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

Effective human movement requires the coordinated participation of the whole musculoskeletal system. Here we propose to represent the human body movements as a network (that we named “kinectome”), where nodes are body parts, and edges are defined as the correlations of the accelerations between each pair of body parts during gait. We apply this framework in healthy individuals and patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The network dynamics in Parkinson’s display high variability, as conveyed by the high variance and the modular structure in the patients’ kinectomes. Furthermore, our analysis identified a set of anatomical elements that are specifically related to the balance impairment in PD. Furthermore, each participant could be identified based on its kinectome patterns, akin to a “fingerprint” of movement, confirming that our approach captures relevant features of gait. We hope that applying network approaches to human kinematics yields new insights to characterize human movement.