Selective Motor Entropy Modulation and Targeted Augmentation for the Identification of Parkinsonian Gait Patterns Using Multimodal Gait Analysis

TL;DR

This study shows that selectively augmenting Parkinsonian gait data while preserving healthy motor patterns improves classification accuracy and physiological coherence in gait analysis models.

Contribution

Introduces a physiology-informed selective augmentation strategy that improves gait classification by preserving natural motor variability in healthy data.

Findings

Selective augmentation of pathological gait achieved 94.1% accuracy and 0.97 AUC in classification.

Performance dropped when augmentation exceeded a physiologically plausible range of variability.

Respecting motor variability differences is crucial for clinical gait analysis model design.

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Parkinsonian gait is characterized by impaired motor adaptability, altered temporal organization, and reduced movement variability. While data augmentation is commonly used to mitigate class imbalance in gait-based machine learning models, conventional strategies often ignore physiological differences between healthy and pathological movements, potentially distorting meaningful motor dynamics. This study explores whether preserving healthy motor variability while selectively augmenting pathological gait signals can improve the robustness and physiological coherence of gait pattern classification models. Methods: Eight patients with Parkinsonian gait patterns and forty-eight healthy participants performed walking tasks on the Motigravity platform under hypogravity conditions. Full-body kinematic data were acquired using wearable inertial sensors. A selective augmentation strategy based on smooth time-warping was applied exclusively to pathological gait segments (×5, σ = 0.2), while healthy gait signals were left unaltered to preserve natural motor variability. Model performance was evaluated using a hybrid convolutional neural network–long short-term memory (CNN–LSTM) architecture across multiple augmentation configurations. Results: Selective augmentation of pathological gait signals achieved the highest classification performance (94.1% accuracy, AUC = 0.97), with balanced sensitivity (93.8%) and specificity (94.3%). Performance decreased when augmentation exceeded an optimal range of variability, suggesting that beneficial augmentation is constrained by physiologically plausible temporal dynamics. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that physiology-informed, selective data augmentation can improve gait pattern classification under constrained data conditions. Rather than supporting disease-specific diagnosis, this proof-of-concept study highlights the importance of respecting intrinsic differences in motor variability when designing augmentation strategies for clinical gait analysis. Future studies incorporating disease-control cohorts and subject-independent validation are required to assess specificity and clinical generalizability.

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