The brain is the most complex organ of the human body. To understand it, a prime question that one needs to ask is: why do we and other animals have brains?

Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert says: “We have a brain for one reason and one reason only; that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements. That’s the only reason to have a brain.”

Science and engineering have unravelled great mysteries in the past years. The amino acid sequence of the human genome has been unveiled, the composition of the human proteome is now known and action potentials can be measured with millisecond precision. Yet, there is to date no systematic collection of data about the sense of movement of the human body. In analogy to the ‘genome’, we call this the ‘ethome’.

Ageing and mental diseases can lead to movement disorders. It is estimated that worldwide, every year, two million people suffer from multiple sclerosis, 10 million people suffer from Parkinson’s disease and 15 million people have a stroke. Currently, neurologists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists score the motor performance of patients in sophisticated laboratories or clinics by eye, based on the performance of some arbitrarily defined laboratory tasks.

There are several drawbacks in this method of assessment. Firstly, visual assessment is difficult because of interactions between multiple degrees of freedom of the body. Secondly, it is cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming to analyse patient motion in the clinic. It is more practical and convenient to have such motion assessments in the patient’s home. Moreover, with the current means of assessment, different assessors can assess the same patient differently.

During my Master’s degree at Imperial College London in 2012, I worked on a research project in the Brain and Behaviour Lab under the supervision of Dr Aldo Faisal, to develop an experimental paradigm for the collection and annotation of unconstrained natural human motion data.

Such data can in turn be used to devise an objective and quantitative characterisation of motor function measurement, across which movement disorders can be assessed.

To this end, we used a non-invasive body-worn motion capture suit to collect human ethomics data in the bedroom, kitchen and office. The suit has 15 sensors located throughout the body, and each measures position, acceleration and rotation.

In the bedroom, we recorded movement data of actions such as how people go to bed, the way they cover themselves with a blanket, how they wear and take off clothes. Data recorded in the office scenario describes actions such as how people interact with a mouse and keyboard, the way they write, how they flip pages while reading a book. In the kitchen environment, participants were recorded as they prepared breakfast, ate, and cleared the table. Every action was annotated on a software program that I designed.

For each participant, we looked at 66 different tasks over four hour-long recordings. Participants included 45 young healthy adults and one patient suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

The data collected constitutes the first ethomics database of human movement in daily environments and can serve as a fingerprint of behaviour and as a tool for the assessment and diagnostics of motor disease.

This research project and the related Master’s were carried out following the award of a Steps scholarship, which is part-financed by the European Social Fund.