Reality instead of lab conditions

Out of the lab into the real world - that was this year's motto of the winter symposium of the Human Motion Project. The network with scientists from different areas collects data with mobile accelerometry. Here for example the "actibelt"-sensor is a new tool to measure mobility in clinical research. At the clinical center in Munich the experts met in March to interchange their experience and to pave the way for a tighter cooperation of the project partners.

"It is not about telling each other how good we are," Dr. Martin Daumer, Munich, clarifies. Instead the symposium is supposed to help to close the gap between clinical application and labs. After a look into the history of the science of walking by Andreas Mayer, the lectures were about the perspectives for research and mainly the application in the patients' daily life: the mobile accelerometry as new possibility to measure mobility in clinical research, is Daumer's research focus and was basis of many studies presented at the symposium. The term means the objective measuring method to measure physical activity, accelerometers like "actibelt" record the intensity and duration of uni-axial or multi-axial accelerations. The data collected this way shall be brought together in the framework of the Human Motion Project, an international network of numerous renowned scientists from statistics, data management, computer sciences, mathematics, techno-mathematics, medicine and biology, and thus contribute to a new definition of the outcome for clinical studies.