01
Observe movement as a system
Study movement as the visible behavior of interacting physiological, neural, muscular, mechanical, behavioral, task, and environmental systems.
Human Movement Systems Laboratory
A laboratory built around clinical questions.
The HMS Lab is the empirical movement research program of Movement Systems: clinically oriented, grounded in physical therapy, and designed to move questions from practice into rigorous inquiry and back again.
Clinical observationMovement questionMeasurementMechanismClinical inquiry
Purpose
Research for a profession organized around movement.
Physical therapists do not merely apply movement science. They encounter movement in context, form explanations, test change, and revise what they believe about a person.
The HMS Lab makes that work scientifically inspectable. It connects clinical observation to measurement and modeling without reducing a person to a signal, a diagnosis, or a laboratory task.
02
Make clinical questions testable
Translate a puzzling pattern from practice into competing explanations, observable quantities, and research designs that can change what the profession knows.
03
Return knowledge to care
Develop clinically meaningful explanations and methods while preserving the boundary between research findings and conclusions about an individual patient.
A clinical research identity
Not a gait lab with clinical applications. A clinical inquiry lab that studies movement.
Rehabilitation, functional movement, motor control, physiological stress, ergonomics, adaptation, human performance, and human-device interaction all belong when they sharpen a question that matters to movement and care.
Instruments are selected because a question requires them. Capabilities are published only after readiness, uncertainty, and interpretive limits have been established.
Program development
Current work is foundational.
The laboratory program is defining its research agenda, inventorying resources, specifying governance, and identifying representative pilot questions. This site does not yet claim operational measurement services or validated laboratory capabilities.
See the emerging research agenda- Verify equipment, software, space, access, and limits.
- Design pilot work from clinical and scientific questions.
- Govern research, education, clinical care, privacy, and participation.
- Demonstrate capability before describing it as operational.
Program leadership
Sean M. Collins, PT, ScD
Physical therapist · Professor of Clinical Inquiry · Scientist · Educator
The HMS Lab extends a program spanning physical therapy, clinical physiology, physiological measurement, ergonomics and human factors, causal analysis, evidence synthesis, and computational clinical inquiry. It is a convergence of that work, not a departure from it.
View the professional programStudents and clinicians
Questions should have somewhere to go.
The lab is intended to create a durable pathway for students, faculty, and clinicians to develop observations into structured inquiry. Participation can range from literature and method work to governed data collection, analysis, modeling, and public scholarship.
Clinical observation should be able to become a research question without a patient automatically becoming a research participant.