 The Stem and Philippan Research Institute is well known as a cutting-edge research facility and we're uniquely located in Vale at the base of a ski slope. And today we are conducting a study looking at knee injury risk in alpine skiers. Skiers, as many of you know, have a tendency to tear their ACLs and have knee injuries at a higher rate than in many other sports. And women in particular have higher rates of ACL injury in skiing than men. In this study, we're looking at the way that ski boots affect someone's movement. We're adjusting the way that people's boots are fit by adding small wedges either inside the boot or outside the boot between the boot and the binding to change the way that they stand on their skis, whether that's to bring someone in or out or forward or backward a little bit. Because when you're in your ski boot, your ankle joint is pretty locked. We want to make sure that people are in a good position where they can move dynamically and be able to change their balance. The BioMotion Lab is equipped with an 18-camera motion capture system. They emit an infrared light that reflects off of the markers that our research participants wear. We also have force plates embedded in the ground so we can see not just how hard somebody is impacting the ground when they're running or jumping or doing any kind of movement, but we can see what direction. We also have a muscle activation sensor system, and as somebody turns their muscle on or off, we can see signals in how much they're activating their muscles. So during this study, we're having skiers perform movements in the lab that are similar to ones that they would perform outside. They're going to be doing a static balancing, just standing on one foot. We're also putting them on rotation discs. One of the biggest movements in skiing is being able to rotate your legs separately from your upper body. And then finally, we're putting them on a ramped treadmill. This is the closest we can get to simulating skiing indoors, looking at side-to-side edging movements, and then up-and-down pressure adjustment movements. What's really exciting about this study is that we have the opportunity to learn about how the equipment limitations affect the injury rates and whether we can help drive change within the ski industry to reduce injury and to make skiing more comfortable and fun for everyone. The research at the Stem and Philopon Research Institute, particularly in the BioMotion Lab, is heavily dependent on the volunteer time of members of our community who come in and participate in our research studies. We depend on people like you. We're aiming for about 30 men and 30 women. If you're interested in participating, please send us an email at bio-motion at spryveil.org, and we would love to have you participate either in this study or some of the other projects that we have going on.