Comparative study of multiscale entropy analysis and symbolic time series analysis when applied to human gait dynamics

The chronological vacillations in the stride to stride interval provide a noninvasive method to assess the influence of malfunction of human gait and its alterations with disease and age. To extract information from the human stride interval, various complexity analysis techniques have been proposed. In the present study, the comparison of two recently developed complexity analysis methodologies: multiscale entropy (MSE) and symbolic entropy (SyEn) has been made. These techniques were applied to stride interval time series data of human gait walking at normal and metronomically paced stressed conditions. Wilcoxon-rank-sum test (Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) test) was used to find the significant difference between the groups. For each method of analysis, parameters were adjusted to optimize the separation of the groups. The symbolic entropy method provided maximum separation at wide range of threshold values and this measure was found to be more robust for analyzing the human gait data as compared to multiscale entropy in the presence of dynamical and observational noise. The results of this study can have implication modeling physiological control mechanism and for quantifying human gait dynamics in physiological and stressed conditions.