The biomechanics of tai chi: New faculty member brings an engineering perspective to rehabilitation research

By Kate Hunger 

For years, Wei Liu, Ph.D., has researched tai chi as a rehabilitation intervention and exercise treatment option for people with knee osteoarthritis and other disabilities such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and low back pain. Still, he admits there is much to learn about the benefits offered by the ancient practice of continuous, controlled movements. 

“Why is tai chi beneficial? We don’t know the reason yet,” said Dr. Liu, who joined the School of Health Professions as research faculty in January and is appointed to the Department of Physical Therapy. He most recently was associate professor and research director at Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine–Auburn. 

Dr. Liu has been researching specific tai chi forms. He is the corresponding author of two recently published articles on a pair of pilot studies involving tai chi and rehabilitation in subjects with knee osteoarthritis, both of which were funded in by part by a five-year Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award from the National Center of Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) at National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Liu is in the third year of the grant, which is focused on mechanistic research of tai chi rehabilitation.

An article published online in February in Gait & Posture shares the findings of a pilot study seeking to compare how different tai chi forms affect the dynamic stability of people with knee osteoarthritis, who are at risk for falls. Another article published in February in Osteoarthritis and Cartilage Open shares the results of a pilot study that compared the biomechanical load on the knee joint of study participants with knee osteoarthritis while they performed 24 tai chi forms and determined whether the load was causing knee joint pain. Both pilot studies provide a promising scientific basis for further research into how best to optimize or “prescribe” tai chi forms for patients with knee osteoarthritis and older adults with fall risk to mitigate fall risk and knee joint pain, Dr. Liu said.

Tai chi is just one of the many integrated health modalities that interest Dr. Liu. Others include yoga, herbal nutrition supplements, and manipulative therapy. 

“My research interest is to develop optimization of nonpharmacological approaches to maximize the potential benefit for individuals including veterans who have disabilities,” he said.

Dr. Liu, who earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering before earning his Ph.D. in physical rehabilitation science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), approaches his research from an engineer’s perspective. He is involved in the creation of the School of Health Professions’ rehabilitation biomechanics lab, which is under construction. 

“The lab itself will host a state-of-the-art motion-capture system that has 10 high-speed, infrared cameras that can capture up to 500 snapshots per second,” he said. “The lab is going to have multiple force plates that allow us to capture the force information.”

Having kinematics from the cameras and kinetics from the force plates will enable researchers to perform musculoskeletal modeling, he said, noting that the lab will be available for use by researchers across UT Health San Antonio.

“That is attractive to researchers,” he said. “You have all the comprehensive information.”