Development of an integrated biomechanics informatics system with knowledge discovery and decision support tools for research of injury prevention and performance enhancement

Abstract

The field of biomechanics involves integrating a variety of data types such as waveform, video, discrete, and performance. These different sources of data must be efficiently and accurately associated to provide meaningful feedback to athletes, coaches, and healthcare professionals to prevent injury and improve rehabilitation/performance. There are many challenges in biomechanics research such as data storage, standardization, review, sharing, and accessibility. Data is stored in different formats, structures, and locations such as physical hard drives or Dropbox/Google Drive, leading to issues during sharing and collaboration. Data is reviewed and analyzed through different software applications that need to be downloaded and installed locally before they are available for use. An integrated biomechanics informatics system (IBIS) built based on the core principles in medical imaging informatics provides a solution to many of these challenges. The system provides a secure web-based platform that will be accessible remotely for authenticated users to upload, share, and download data. The web-based application includes built-in data viewers that are streamlined for reviewing multimedia data and decision support/knowledge discovery tools. These tools include automatic foot contact detection for pre-processing, built-in statistical analysis applications for longitudinal and cross-study analysis, and a multi-institutional collaboration module. The IBIS system creates a centralized hub to support multi-institutional collaborative biomechanics research and analysis that is remotely accessible to all users including athletes, coaches, researchers, and clinicians generating a novel streamlined research workflow, data analysis, and knowledge discovery process.