movement

a Python toolbox for analysing motion tracking data

Niko Sirmpilatze @ FOSDEM 2026

2026-01-31

whoami

• Neuroscientist & Research Software Engineer 🧠🐭💻
• Neuroinformatics Unit, Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL
• Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute
• Lead developer of movement

Find me online

niksirbi | @niksirbi@neuromatch.social | nikosirmpilatze.com

Measuring behaviour as movement

Defining behaviour is tricky, but many have tried.

The total movements made by the intact animal (Tinbergen 1951).

We can quantify movements through various tools:

• 🎥 Video cameras
• 📱 Inertial measurement units (IMUs)
• 🛰️ GPS-based biologgers

From videos to motion

By danceinthesky, openverse.org

“CRISPR Ants Lose Ability to Smell” (2017)

deeplabcut.org (Mathis et al. 2018)

Markerless pose estimation

sleap.ai (Pereira et al. 2022)

Animal behaviour 🤝 computer vision

What happens after tracking?

• Lack of standardised data formats and tools
• Lots of fragile ‘in-house’ scripts
• Piles of un-analysed data

movement: overview

movement: example applications

See also movement.neuroinformatics.dev/latest/examples

movement GUI

Community adoption

• ~80k downloads (PyPI + conda-forge)
• 34 code contributors | ~330 merged pull requests
• External packages depending on movement:

ethoml.github.io/VAME

docs.lisbet.ai

 

The bigger picture

The even bigger picture

Long-term vision: movement as the scikit-image for animal motion data.

Acknowledgements

Join the movement!

• movement.neuroinformatics.dev
• github.com/neuroinformatics-unit/movement
• neuroinformatics.zulipchat.com > movement

📅 Aug 17-21 2026

Animals in Motion workshop at the Open Software Summer School.

• animals-in-motion.neuroinformatics.dev
• neuroinformatics.dev/open-software-summer-school/

References

“CRISPR Ants Lose Ability to Smell.” 2017. Nature 548 (7667): 263–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-02337-4.

Mathis, Alexander, Pranav Mamidanna, Kevin M. Cury, Taiga Abe, Venkatesh N. Murthy, Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis, and Matthias Bethge. 2018. “DeepLabCut: Markerless Pose Estimation of User-Defined Body Parts with Deep Learning.” Nature Neuroscience 21 (9): 1281–89. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0209-y.

Pereira, Talmo D., Nathaniel Tabris, Arie Matsliah, David M. Turner, Junyu Li, Shruthi Ravindranath, Eleni S. Papadoyannis, et al. 2022. “SLEAP: A Deep Learning System for Multi-Animal Pose Tracking.” Nature Methods 19 (4): 486–95. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01426-1.

Tinbergen, Niko. 1951. The Study of Instinct. Clarendon Press.