Motion-BIDS: an extension to the brain imaging data structure to organize motion data for reproducible research

Abstract

We present an extension to the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) for motion data. Motion data is frequently recorded alongside human brain imaging and electrophysiological data. The goal of Motion-BIDS is to make motion data interoperable across different laboratories and with other data modalities in human brain and behavioral research. To this end, Motion-BIDS standardizes the data format and metadata structure. It describes how to document experimental details, considering the diversity of hardware and software systems for motion data. This promotes findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data sharing and Open Science in human motion research.

Fig. 1

Overview of an exemplary Motion-BIDS data set that contains three accelerometer channels and three gyroscope channels along with heel strike events. On the left, three-channel accelerometer data and the timing of heel strike events are visualized. In the middle, the directory structure following BIDS is shown. Each subject-specific folder (for example, “sub-001”) contains a modality-specific motion folder, within which “motion.tsv”, “motion.json”, “events.tsv”, and “channels.tsv” files are found. Exemplary contents for each file type are shown in boxes around the central panel.