Motion Analytics: Exploring Movement in Nature and Medicine

Studying motor behaviors can reveal fundamental principles of the brain and mind. This presentation focuses on our work towards developing the hardware and computational tools that will allow scientist to measure movement of an individual in a dynamic environment. The octopus has many features that makes it advantageous for pursuing a holistic understanding of motor control and behavior and mapping central and peripheral neural circuits. We will show novel technologies to record electrophysiology signals from octopus’s nervous system and the potential of new computer vision platforms to measure octopus movement with high resolution. Using these approaches, we can start modeling octopus arm movement with high precision. These methods could improve brain-machine interface neuroprostheses and help develop new assistive technologies that will allow compensation and augmentation of specific circuits. We will also demonstrate how understanding motor behavior is critical to measure normal development in a translational animal model, and how neurotrauma interferes with normal motor behaviors.

Learning Objectives:

1. Review concepts of motion analytics.

2. Discuss new computational technologies to analyze movement.

3. Summarize how to analyze motor behaviors in animal models.