Team Leader: Geoff Fernie

This team strives to optimize mobility using a two-pronged approach:

  • preventing loss of mobility with exercise and innovative interventions; and
  • restoring mobility to those who have experienced a decrease, whether gradually due to aging, or rapidly after a stroke, brain injury, fall, or other life-altering event.   

Team members have expertise in the study and treatment of human movement (kinesiologists and physiotherapists), structure and design (engineers), and medicine (physicians and nurses). They are a talented and caring unit of transdisciplinary researchers, learning the skills and perspectives of team members outside their primary discipline to become uniquely capable forces within the health care system. To achieve their goals they are developing predictive models to identify those most at risk of falls. They then develop and evaluate interventions to target fall prevention and thus ensure people avoid the need to enter a rehab hospital. They also research, design and test novel therapies and rehab paradigms to boost rate of recovery through intensified exercises. They also provide strategies to ensure people with mobility impairments continue to maintain their physical activity after discharge, enabling their independence from formal rehab and reducing the burden on the health care system. They are interested in using new technology to measure mobility in the community as well to ensure sustainability of benefits.  Their research has broad importance in geriatric, neuro-, and pulmonary rehabilitation.

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