I hold joint appointments in the College of Medicine and the Departments of Community Health, Kinesiology, Psychology, Rehabilitation Education, and Special Education.
Abnormal movements are serious symptoms which are associated with a number of diseases.
For a number of years abnormal, stereotypic movements have been recognized and diagnosed in developmentally disabled populations, especially mentally retarded clients and autistic children. There have also been recent developments in instrumentation and quantitative assessment which holds considerable promise for rapid development in the understanding of abnormal movement disorders. Electronic instrumentation has been developed and adapted by researchers in kinesiology to measure precisely fine motor movements. Non-linear dynamics and chaos theory have provided motor control researchers powerful tools to examine the complex interaction of many muscles and joints operating in an intact person with a movement disorder. One of the continuing theoretical problems hindering understanding in the area is that of degrees of freedom or how can the control mechanisms be best described and understood which control such a vast array of possible movements which often occur very rapidly.