Aug 12, 2026
Dr. Paul Kline and several students present research at a major biomechanics conference in Vancouver
Representatives of Virginia Commonwealth University’s College of Health Professions have returned from presenting research at a major conference in Canada.
Dr. Paul Kline, PT, DPT, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, and Emily Parsowith, a Ph.D. student in the Rehabilitation and Movement Science program, presented research at the 10th World Congress of Biomechanics, hosted in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, earlier this month. Another student, Juliana Bohley, was also present with Kline and Parsowith. She has graduated from VCU with an undergraduate degree in Health, Physical Education and Exercise Science and will begin graduate school in VCU’s Master’s of Biomedical Engineering program.
According to Kline, the reason for attending the event was to present research abstracts on the rehabilitation of patients with lower-limb amputation. Titled “A Comparison of Gait Adaptations During Two Types of Dual-Task Walking in Individuals With Unilateral Lower Limb Amputation,” the research compared different types of dual-tasking, or doing two things at the same time, among patients. Kline presented in two separate sections. Part one focused on gait spatiotemporal outcomes, and part two focused on limb loading symmetry.
“The idea is that after an amputation, there are adaptations that occur where people have to reassign (the) systems they use to get information about their movements, and so we hypothesize that after amputation, people will become more reliant on vision compared to what we call somatosensation (the ability to touch and feel),” Kline said. “Once you lose a limb, you are no longer able to feel and touch with that limb. So, to make up for that deficit, people tend to think that they will rely more on vision.”
The two abstracts investigated patients using a vision-based dual-task and a non-vision-based task, meaning the subjects walked and performed an additional task simultaneously, to see how this affected their walking patterns. Likewise, the research investigated walking speed and the weight placed on each limb during tasks.
Kline noted that the conference went well for him and his group, with attendees asking good questions and showing positive engagement. Getting information about these various projects into the broader academic community is important for Kline and for future research plans.
“The appetite for this type of research question is there, and it really set the stage for some of our current work, which is focused more on visual attention,” Kline said. “A lot of the reception around it validated where we're going next.”
Kline says conferences like the World Congress of Biomechanics are critical for him and his team, as they not only allow him to get his research results to audiences much quicker than publications can. They also provide a broader platform for VCU and CHP and shine a light on the caliber of biomechanical work being done.
“From start to finish, it will probably take a year to get these results in a peer-reviewed journal, whereas being able to share them in a conference in an abstract form gets the results out there to the scientific community a lot sooner,” He said. “(VCU has) a lot of unique attributes in terms of our integration with the health system and our biomechanics lab resources. Having a presence at an international conference like the World Congress of Biomechanics will help us attract top students and other faculty as well as collaborations with other research groups.”
Kline said that a manuscript describing the data from these abstracts is under review and that they hope to be published in a peer-reviewed journal in the coming months. The department also has a follow-on project that uses eye-tracking glasses to better understand what patients look at while completing a set of tasks.
“The idea is that (there are patients) who are really reliant on vision to successfully walk and complete these tasks, and by understanding their strategy for viewing the environment,” Kline said “we can try to help develop training or other strategies to help those individuals who maybe struggle with the vision-based task improve their abilities and walk better in complicated environments that are common in the real-world.”