ABSTRACT
Movements allow us to interact with our environment, express ourselves, and communicate with each other. Life is movement. Movement is constantly occurring at many hierarchical levels including cellular and subcellular levels. By using the adjective “human” to clarify the term “movement,” we are not only defining the species of interest, but also limiting the study to observable performance and its more overt causes. Study of human performance is of interest to a broad range of professionals including rehabilitation engineers, orthopedic surgeons, therapists, biomechanists, kinesiologists, psychologists, and so on. Because of the complexity of human performance and the variety of investigators, the study of human performance is conducted from several theoretical perspectives including (1) anatomical, (2) purpose or character of the movement (such as locomotion), (3) physiological, (4) biomechanical, (5) psychological, (6) socio-cultural, and (7) integrative. The elemental resource model (ERM), presented at the beginning of this section, is an integrative model that incorporates aspects of the other models into a singular system accounting for the human, the task, and the human-task interface [Kondraske, 2005].
