Aug. 14, 2025
From Lab to Market to Better Health
Pitt School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences makes it easy to commercialize new technologies and solutions to support health and independent living.
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Lindy Kravec
The portable speakers are cranked up, playing “These Boots are Made for Walking.” A conga line of older adults makes their way around the room, walking left, pivoting right, navigating cones and other obstacles and giving each other high-fives as they pass along the course. This is not a dance. It’s not a game. It’s an evidence-based group exercise program known as On the Move (OTM), and it’s designed to improve the quality of walking.
OTM was developed more than ten years ago by University of Pittsburgh Professors of Physical Therapy Jessie VanSwearingen and Jennifer Brach as a one-on-one intervention between a physical therapist and patient. After Deborah Brodine, president, UPMC Senior Services, asked if this could be turned into a group exercise class for seniors in the community, Brach began gathering evidence.
The results of a three-year Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) grant showed OTM is not only safe and acceptable, but it also offers clinically meaningful improvements in mobility over the standard sit-and-be-fit programs for older adults.
It was designated an evidence-based chronic disease management program by the Administration for Community Living in 2018 and an evidence-based fall prevention program in 2025. It is only one of three dually recognized evidence-based programs by the National Council on Aging in the United States.
“Our goal is to support our researchers to identify commercial partners to bring their innovations to market.”
Brach and her team have trained more than 180 OTM instructors all over the country and in Australia. The program is licensed for use in 65 locations in 20 states, including Wyoming, where the State Department of Aging made OTM an official exercise program in their senior centers.
“None of this would have been possible without assistance from Pitt’s Innovation Institute,” says Brach. “They helped me with copyrighting the program and the licensing of the On the Move program.”
To accelerate commercial translation of more than 40 innovations developed in Pitt School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), a new commercial translation office was established in 2025.
“Our goal is to support our researchers to identify commercial partners to bring their innovations to market,” explains Jon Pearlman, associate dean for commercial translation and professor of rehabilitation science and technology, SHRS. “While they are engaged with their research, we can help make their work commercially viable so it can make an impact on society.”
Pearlman says the office focuses on increasing and reinforcing SHRS’s already-high level of commercial translation by working closely with investigators and external partners to support licensing and funding opportunities to complement the school’s efforts in research and innovation.
Commercialization of new technologies and solutions pervades SHRS. In every department, researchers are developing a range of innovative technologies to promote holistic health, independence and community participation. They are working on assistive devices and systems that support mobility, communication and daily living activities. They are advancing solutions for physical therapy and rehabilitation to improve patient outcomes and harnessing smart technologies and artificial intelligence that can improve the lives of people with disabilities and those in underserved medical communities.
In the Department of Health Information Management, for example, Associate Professor Leming Zhou, along with Emeritus Associate Professor Valerie Watzlaf and Assistant Professor Kimberly Peterson, developed a mobile app called imHealthy that evaluates an individual's overall well-being in multiple life areas.
The app features a questionnaire that collects data in different domains, such as physical and mental health, personal relationships, and financial and spiritual wellbeing. The data provides health care and other professionals with insight into the needs of individuals as well as communities.
When the Neighborhood Resilience Project (NRP), a Pittsburgh organization dedicated to the transformation of trauma-affected communities to resilient healing and healthy communities, needed a way to evaluate the needs of its medically underserved community, they turned to Zhou.
Through a low-cost licensing agreement, NRP now uses the imHealthy app in its free health clinic.
“We intentionally made the app as simple as possible so it would be easy to understand and use,” says Zhou. “There are bar charts for each domain, and we provide training to those who administer the questionnaire so we will be able to correctly identify and evaluate the most urgent needs for each individual.”
At NRP, staff members administer the questionnaires and then connect the individuals with appropriate resources or health care providers.
“The imHealthy mobile app provides a personalized solution to a population of people who may not have health insurance or a primary care doctor,” adds Zhou. “It can also point out financial or linguistic difficulties that may hinder their access to health care services.”
“We are extremely proud of our researchers who are taking their innovations to the public,” says Pearlman. But his involvement with commercial translation does not stop with the SHRS commercial translation initiative.
Pearlman also serves as codirector of the IMPACT Center—the Initiative to Mobilize Partnerships for Successful Assistive Technology Translation. Awarded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), the center has been supporting NIDILRR grant recipients across the country for the past seven years to commercialize their research.
According to Pearlman, the tools, programs and successes of the IMPACT Center helped to motivate setting up the SHRS Office of Commercialization Translation to focus exclusively on supporting SHRS faculty and staff with the tools and approaches they need for successful knowledge translation. In addition, it offers small businesses a variety of services, including a help desk as well as extensive training programs. Among other classes, there’s an introductory boot camp for those interested in assistive technology transfer, a start-up training for NIDILRR grantees and an accelerated program that helps turn cutting-edge academic research into real-world business solutions that are now available to SHRS.
“The scope of commercial translation has broadened in recent years,” says Pearlman. “But whatever a researcher develops and wherever an investigator wants to take a new idea, we’re here to facilitate the process and provide technical support.”