The mission of the Human Measurement Performance Core is to develop ways to measure of human motor performance and to provide these applications to support development and refinement of effective behavioral treatments resulting from central nervous system injury or disease. Thus, the Human Performance Core provides state of the art experimental and theoretical analysis capabilities to affiliated investigators and projects in order to determine the functional impact of innovative treatments by developing methods to assess target motor functions in natural contexts.

The mission of the Upper Extremity-Motor Research Initiative is to maximize the recovery of upper extremity function in individuals with central nervous system injury or disease and to enhance their quality of life. Our aim, through research, is to apply an understanding of the neurobiological control of the upper extremity and experience-dependent plasticity to develop and test therapeutic training interventions that promote the recovery of functional upper extremity skill.

The mission of the Oral-Motor Research Initiative is to maximize the recovery of oral motor function in individuals with central nervous system injury or disease and to enhance their quality of life. Our aim is to develop and refine behavioral and device driven treatments for a variety of motor control disorders including Parkinson’s disease, Huntington Chorea, Multiple Sclerosis, Spinal cord injury and upper airway dysfunction due to dysarthria. Innovation is focused on the development of a device driven respiratory muscle strength re-training program and refinement includes studying the outcome of this innovation combined with other more traditional and well-studied techniques. Motor control variables are focused on systems involved in breathing, swallow, cough and speech. Finally, one area of development will be on defining new measures of speech intelligibility as it remains one of the major outcome variables of this work.