Portable biomechanics laboratory enables clinically accessible movement analysis from a handheld smartphone
J. D. Peiffer, Kunal Shah, Irina Djuraskovic, Shawana Anarwala, Kayan Abdou, Rujvee Patel, Prakash Jayabalan, Brenton Pennicooke, R. James Cotton · 2026
Read Portable biomechanics laboratory enables clinically accessible movement analysis from a handheld smartphone by J. D. Peiffer, Kunal Shah, Irina Djuraskovic, Shawana Anarwala, Kayan Abdou, Rujvee Patel, Prakash Jayabalan, Brenton Pennicooke, R. James Cotton (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13562619.txt.
Description
J. D. Peiffer and colleagues turned an ordinary smartphone into a portable movement laboratory. Full gait analysis normally needs a costly lab with cameras and force plates, so most clinics settle for stopwatch tests of walking speed. Their system, called the Portable Biomechanics Laboratory, fits a body model to handheld phone video to measure joint motion. A 2026 report validates it against gold-standard motion capture.
Joint-angle errors stayed under three degrees across people with neurological injury, prosthesis users, children in hospital, and healthy controls. In real clinics, more than a thousand videos produced reliable gait measures that tracked disease severity and responded to treatment. The authors argue that phone-based measurement could bring objective movement testing into routine care and trials.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | J. D. Peiffer, Kunal Shah, Irina Djuraskovic, Shawana Anarwala, Kayan Abdou, Rujvee Patel, Prakash Jayabalan, Brenton Pennicooke, R. James Cotton |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 52 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |