Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering
Biomechanics in the wild.
AI Biomechanics Lab studies how everyday movement shapes musculoskeletal health — knee osteoarthritis, life after joint replacement, and the sport that comes before — with motion capture, wearables, and machine learning.
The lab
A biomechanics group that takes the learning part seriously.
We are not a clinic that bolted on a neural net, and we are not an ML group that discovered walking. The work is jointly about sensors, joint loads that actually happen in a day, and whether a number we produce can change what a patient or a coach does next.
- PI
- Kerry E. Costello, Ph.D.
- Home
- MAE · Wertheim 482
- Focus
- Knee OA × AI
- Open studies
- 2 recruiting
Research
Four problems we keep returning to
Knee osteoarthritis
Who gets worse, and what in their movement we could have seen coming.
Life after joint replacement
There is still no uniform rule for going back to yoga after a hip.
Capture, sensors, and learning
Markered when we need the gold standard. Markerless and wearable when we want to capture outside the lab.
Sports biomechanics, before OA
The loads that make a swing powerful are also the loads a joint has to live with.
Selected writing
Recent papers
2026
Osteoarthritis year in review 2025: Biomechanics
J. M. Qualter, A. N. Chertok, A. Buhler, E. K. Laende, K. E. Costello · Osteoarthritis and Cartilage
2026
Shared Strides: community-based, high-throughput biomechanics data collection in knee osteoarthritis
J. M. Qualter, K. E. Costello, and the AI Biomechanics Laboratory · medRxiv
2026
The potential of unstructured “physical activity” data for understanding relationships between movement-induced joint loading and osteoarthritis progression
P. Schaefer, Z. T. Struk, K. E. Costello · Osteoarthritis and Cartilage Open
2023
Gait, physical activity and tibiofemoral cartilage damage: a longitudinal machine learning analysis in the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study
K. E. Costello, D. T. Felson, S. R. Jafarzadeh, A. Guermazi, F. W. Roemer, et al. · British Journal of Sports Medicine
People
Mechanical engineering, BME, APK, and computer science in one room.
Faculty, doctoral students, and a rotating bench of undergraduates. If you want to join, the application still has to contain the phrase “biomechanics in the wild.”
Meet the team
Visit
Herbert Wertheim Laboratory for Engineering Excellence
Capture in MAE-B. Compute in the Miller lab. PI office Wertheim 482, Gainesville, Florida. Prospective Ph.D. students should email a CV and a paragraph on the problem they want to work on — not a generic interest in “AI and health.”
k.costello@ufl.edu