Open AccessIndividuality decoded by running patterns: Movement characteristics that determine the uniqueness of human running
Author(s) -
Fabian Hoitz,
Vinzenz von Tscharner,
Jennifer Baltich,
Benno M. Nigg
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0249657
Subject(s) - sagittal plane , coronal plane , gait , ground reaction force , kinematics , effect of gait parameters on energetic cost , transverse plane , artificial neural network , computer science , gait analysis , physical medicine and rehabilitation , movement (music) , artificial intelligence , physics , medicine , anatomy , acoustics , classical mechanics
Human gait is as unique to an individual as is their fingerprint. It remains unknown, however, what gait characteristics differentiate well between individuals that could define the uniqueness of human gait. The purpose of this work was to determine the gait characteristics that were most relevant for a neural network to identify individuals based on their running patterns. An artificial neural network was trained to recognize kinetic and kinematic movement trajectories of overground running from 50 healthy novice runners (males and females). Using layer-wise relevance propagation, the contribution of each variable to the classification result of the neural network was determined. It was found that gait characteristics of the coronal and transverse plane as well as medio-lateral ground reaction forces provided more information for subject identification than gait characteristics of the sagittal plane and ground reaction forces in vertical or anterior-posterior direction. Additionally, gait characteristics during the early stance were more relevant for gait recognition than those of the mid and late stance phase. It was concluded that the uniqueness of human gait is predominantly encoded in movements of the coronal and transverse plane during early stance.