The Long Game of Biomechanics

This first blog is long overdue as half a year has passed since our acquisition of C-Motion’s Intellectual Property. All fingers should point to me as the cause of this delay as I haven’t found the “right” words to describe this transformation in my life. For 27 years of C-Motion’s existence and 5 years of Theia Markerless’s existence I have been part of a mission to develop software to foster an understanding of the biomechanics of human movement.

I have had the good fortune to have wonderful colleagues, wonderful collaborators, customers who have made it financially possible, and the luxury to focus only on motion capture data. Still I seem to be just getting started on the full potential of this work; I am on the cusp of Round 2 as I am blessed with family, partners, longtime collaborators, enthusiastic young colleagues and emerging technologies.

Round 1

C-Motion began in 1997 through cooperation and funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the endless enthusiastic support of Dr. Steven Stanhope. The goals of our first NIH grant, and my personal continuing mandate, reflected the following requirements, critical for the future of motion capture research as it is applied to the health and capacity for human performance:

These goals have proved elusive over the decades, despite the efforts of a very large and dedicated community and the steady evolution of motion capture technology. That motion capture, and biomechanics in general, has failed to see widespread adoption may stem from its technical complexity, but more likely is that it has been time consuming, sensitive to cavalier data collection, and disconnected from natural–or as some would say, ecological–behaviour. In other words, it is too darn hard to collect reproducible movement in real situations.  The evolution and adoption of video-based markerless motion capture will address the challenges of motion capture, but this is only a beginning to understanding human performance. 

Round 2

My motivation, and C-Motion’s singular focus, was to provide research-grade biomechanics software in the hopes that it could provide a framework for assessments of human health and performance based on 3D motion capture. We devoted our efforts to enabling and sometimes educating our colleagues. Along the way we have always championed biomechanics. We played  a “long game”, yet suddenly our niche area of biomechanics has begun to garner attention.

One of the challenges to a “long game” is it takes a “long time”, and one of the surprises when age creeps up on you, is there comes a time when it is imperative to revitalize your strategy. January 2nd, 2024 was that time for me and for C-Motion. On that day C-Motion announced that it had agreed to sell its world-class biomechanics analysis software assets to HAS-Motion of Kingston, Ontario in Canada.

This sale allowed C-Motion to ensure that the applications that the biomechanics community has trusted over the past two decades, most notably Visual3D, will continue to be developed and supported. Many things, however, have changed because of how motion capture data has proliferated and HAS-Motion intends to shoulder its part of this new challenge. Through the energy and enthusiasm of my young colleagues, this will be more than just the acquisition of C-Motion’s assets by another company. This is the next chapter in the life of this work, and also my career and as we address these new challenges and opportunities head on. HAS-Motion’s mission will be much the same as C-Motion’s since 1997: to help foster an understanding of human motion.

Technology has changed and a new, exciting “long game” has begun.