Multivariate Multiscale Symbolic Entropy Analysis of Human Gait Signals

The complexity quantification of human gait time series has received considerable interest for wearable healthcare. Symbolic entropy is one of the most prevalent algorithms used to measure the complexity of a time series, but it fails to account for the multiple time scales and multi-channel statistical dependence inherent in such time series. To overcome this problem, multivariate multiscale symbolic entropy is proposed in this paper to distinguish the complexity of human gait signals in health and disease. The embedding dimension, time delay and quantization levels are appropriately designed to construct similarity of signals for calculating complexity of human gait. The proposed method can accurately detect healthy and pathologic group from realistic multivariate human gait time series on multiple scales. It strongly supports wearable healthcare with simplicity, robustness, and fast computation.