Special Issue: Movement Biomechanics and Motor Control

When Applied Science invited me to organize a Special Issue on Movement Biomechanics and Motor Control, more than one year ago, I was surprised, but also flattered by the invitation. Actually, Movement Biomechanics and Motor Control was the name of my laboratory at Politecnico di Milano. The name comes from the intense activity we developed in this field many years ago, mainly thanks to my great friend Prof. Paolo Crenna, who passed away prematurely. I started contacting old friends, Prof. Marco Schieppati in particular, who suggested a number of outstanding researchers to me and accepted to work on the excellent review that you can see published in the present issue [1]. I was impressed by the warm responsiveness of most authors who accepted to contribute with their original papers. As I supposed, some of the contacted persons already had a plan of publication, but some of them accepted to change it in favor of this Special Issue. This was a sign of the interest of this topic, which is really multifaceted and still has wide areas that are worth investigating. This special issue provides a demonstration of this. The papers collected deal with anticipatory postural adjustments [2] and anticipatory locomotor adjustments [3], strategies to tackle obstacles [2,3,4], the effects of weight unloading on gait [5], posture control in special populations: ataxic children [6] and obese subjects [7], surface perturbation during posture [8], effects of sensory information and feedback on postural control [9,10], elderly behavior during a motor-motor double task [11], upper limb control [12,13], different aspects related to running: ankle joint dynamic stiffness [14] and fatigue [15]. There is also a flash on an ecologic condition where a pedestrian has to program its strategy to cross a road in between two moving vehicles [16], and a study on visual-manual control in monkeys [17].

While selecting the contributions I tried to comply with the main inspiration of this special issue, that was not biomechanics alone (an extremely wide area), nor motor control alone (extremely wide as well), but the integration between biomechanical and motor control aspects. Actually, all of the collected papers investigate motor control with a basis in more or less complicated movement biomechanics methodologies and use biomechanical concepts, so the purpose seems to have been fulfilled.

I am quite sure that such a wide spectrum of research studies offers a useful overview of the present interests and future perspectives in this area.

I must thank all the authors that contributed to realize this high quality editorial initiative, and I hope this collection will be useful and stimulating for future studies and applications.