Occupational Performance and Movement Analysis Lab
Study how movement, muscle activity, force, visual attention, and task demands shape everyday performance in RIT’s Occupational Performance and Movement Analysis Lab. Occupational therapy doctoral students use research-grade systems to collect and interpret data while people reach, walk, transfer, use tools, interact with technology, and complete other functional activities. The lab supports hands-on coursework, faculty and student research, interprofessional projects, and doctoral capstone work.
What is an Occupational Performance and Movement Analysis Lab?
Occupational performance refers to how people carry out the activities they need and want to do in daily life. Movement analysis provides detailed information about the physical, sensory, and environmental factors that influence that performance.
The lab brings several forms of measurement into a synchronized system. Optical motion capture records three-dimensional body movement. Force plates measure balance, weight shifting, and forces between the body and the ground. Wireless electromyography records the timing and intensity of muscle activation. Eye-tracking technology identifies where visual attention is directed, and synchronized video preserves the context in which the activity occurs.
Students use these measurements to examine the relationship among the person, the activity, and the environment. The resulting evidence supports clinical reasoning, intervention planning, adaptive design, and the evaluation of rehabilitation technologies.
What do students learn in the Occupational Performance and Movement Analysis Lab?
Students learn to:
- Prepare and calibrate measurement systems and follow structured data-collection protocols.
- Place motion-capture markers and wireless sensors.
- Record movement during functional activities such as reaching, walking, transferring, carrying objects, and using tools.
- Examine joint motion, movement patterns, balance, force production, muscle activation, and visual attention.
- Integrate quantitative data with clinical observation and the individual patient’s goals.
- Compare performance under different task or environmental conditions.
- Evaluate how interventions, orthoses, adaptive equipment, and emerging technologies affect performance.
- Design and conduct studies for coursework, research, and doctoral capstone projects.
- Present findings to clinicians, patients, researchers, designers, and other collaborators.
This work reflects the RIT OTD program’s Measure–Design–Make approach. Students gather evidence about performance, develop a purposeful response, implement or test the solution, and evaluate the results.
What technology and equipment will students work with?
The lab is equipped with:
- A 12-camera Vicon Valkyrie VK6 optical motion-capture system for recording three-dimensional body movement.
- Vicon Nexus software for capturing, processing, and analyzing movement data.
- AMTI force plates for measuring ground-reaction forces, balance, weight shifting, and center of pressure.
- A Delsys Trigno Avanti Research+ 16-channel wireless surface electromyography system for recording muscle activation and movement data.
- Tobii Pro Glasses 3 wearable eye-tracking technology for studying visual attention during movement and real-world activities.
- A motion-capture marker system that connects gaze information from the Tobii Pro Glasses 3 with body-movement data.
- Tobii Pro Lab software for processing and analyzing eye-tracking data.
- Two synchronized FLIR Blackfly S reference-video cameras for recording task performance.
- Vicon synchronization and data-acquisition hardware for aligning motion, force, muscle-activity, eye-tracking, and video recordings.
Synchronized data allow students to examine several dimensions of occupational performance during the same activity. They can see how a person moves, how forces are distributed, when muscles activate, where attention is directed, and how those responses change when the activity, environment, or intervention changes.
