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Our vision is that every child will move and communicate successfully in order to achieve their full potential throughout life. Our mission is to use engineering principles to understand childhood movement and to discover new treatments and enabling devices that will improve motor function in children with developmental disorders of movement.
Ongoing research in the Pediatric Movement Disorders Laboratory is divided along three primary tracks: (1) phenomenology of movement and movement disorders, (2) methods for retraining abnormal movement, and (3) computational modeling of movement, motor learning, and childhood motor development. Studies of phenomenology include investigations of the kinematic patterns of arm reaching movements, the response of children to unexpected perturbations during movement, and the patterns of muscle activity that are responsible for normal and abnormal movement. Studies of retraining include investigations of barriers that prevent motor learning and testing of new methods and devices for training accurate control of multiple muscles. Computational studies include models of populations of neurons in motor areas of the brain, control-theoretic models of motor learning and adaptation, and investigations of the contribution of random noise and neural injury to abnormal movement.
-phenomenology of movement and movement disorders
-methods for retraining abnormal movement
-computational modeling of movement, motor learning, and childhood motor development
-previous and ongoing projects