Abstract
Concussion is an inherent risk of participating in contact, combat, or collision sports, within which head impacts are numerous. Kinematic parameters such as peak linear and rotational acceleration represent primary measures of concussive head impacts. The ability to accurately measure and categorise such impact parameters in real time is important in health and sports performance contexts. The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of the latest HitIQ Nexus A9 instrumented mouthguard (HitIQ Pty. Ltd. Melbourne Australia) against reference sensors in an aluminium headform. The headform underwent drop testing at various impact intensities across the NOCSAE-defined impact locations, comparing the peak linear and rotational acceleration (PLA and PRA) as well as the shapes of the acceleration time-series traces for each impact. Mouthguard PLA and PRA measurements strongly correlated with (R2 = 0.996 and 0.994 respectively), and strongly agreed with (LCCC = 0.997) the reference sensors. The root mean square error between the measurement devices was 1 ± 0.6g for linear acceleration and 47.4 ± 35 rad/s2 for rotational acceleration. A Bland–Altman analysis found a systematic bias of 1% for PRA, with no significant bias for PLA. The instrumented mouthguard displayed high accuracy when measuring head impact kinematics in a laboratory setting.
Highlights
Concussion is an inherent risk of participating in contact, combat, or collision sports.All attract high numbers of participants, with over 23 million registered participants internationally [1,2,3,4,5]
The peak values measured by the mouthguard showed strong positive correlation with those of the reference sensors (R2 = 0.996 for peak linear acceleration (PLA) and 0.994 for PRA)
(p = 0.11) for PLA, and Figure 3d shows a significant bias of 1% for PRA (p < 0.05)
Summary
Concussion is an inherent risk of participating in contact, combat, or collision sports.All attract high numbers of participants, with over 23 million registered participants internationally [1,2,3,4,5]. Concussion is an inherent risk of participating in contact, combat, or collision sports. Given the high intensity of these sports, injuries are common, with concussions being one of the most common. One study estimated as many as 300,000 sportsrelated concussions occur annually in the US alone [6], creating an associated economic burden of USD 60 billion annually [7]. Numerous researchers have investigated concussion rates, and reports vary, with 0.5–250.6/1000 athlete exposures (AE) [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. An AE is defined as one person participating in one game or match.
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