01
Study movement in context
Study movement as emergent, adaptive behavior shaped by interacting person, task, environmental, physiological, neural, mechanical, behavioral, and historical conditions.
HMS Lab · About
Clinically grounded research and development.
The HMS Lab connects questions from physical therapy to movement science, accessible technology, empirical evaluation, and practical resources for education and care.
Purpose
Develop the profession’s capacity to understand movement.
Physical therapists encounter movement in context, form explanations, influence change, and revise what they believe about a person.
The HMS Lab turns those encounters into focused R&D: questions, measurements, prototypes, physiological and mechanical analyses, computational models, and methods that can be evaluated and improved.
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Develop ways to test questions
Translate observations into competing explanations, observable quantities, accessible measurements, prototypes, models, and research designs.
03
Return knowledge to care
Refine and openly share useful explanations, tools, methods, and learning resources for movement-system practice.
Foundations
Clinical purpose, movement science, systems thinking, and engineering.
The lab brings complementary professional and scientific traditions to one practical problem: developing better ways to understand and improve movement.
These communities orient the work without substituting affiliation for evidence or complexity for a specific, testable explanation.
Physical therapy
APTA’s movement-system orientation grounds the work in professional expertise, clinical practice, education, and improving people’s lives through movement.
Biomechanics
The American Society of Biomechanics community contributes rigorous approaches to observing, measuring, and explaining human movement.
Dynamical and complex adaptive systems
These perspectives focus attention on emergence, coordination, stability, adaptation, history, nested scales, context, and change over time.
Constraints and dynamic resources
Organismic, task, and environmental constraints interact with available mechanical and physiological resources to shape possible movement solutions.
Ecological approaches
Ecological psychology and ecological dynamics direct attention to information, action capabilities, exploration, and adaptable performance in context.
Biomedical engineering
IEEE EMBS and open maker traditions inform an iterative culture of design, prototyping, testing, documentation, repair, and shared technology.
An open development culture
Build, measure, learn, and share.
Open-source software, accessible instrumentation, hands-on fabrication, and reproducible workflows make development inspectable and adaptable.
Clinical and scientific questions guide the technology. Every prototype remains a claim to test, not evidence of validity or clinical usefulness by itself.
Program development
Build the foundation deliberately.
The laboratory is developing the research agenda, measurement methods, governance, collaborations, and student pathways required for durable R&D.
- Verify equipment, software, space, access, and limits.
- Design projects from clinical and scientific questions.
- Govern research, education, clinical care, privacy, and participation.
- Develop and evaluate methods through documented, reproducible work.