Quantifying Head Impact Exposure in Collegiate Women's Soccer.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to quantify head impact exposure for a collegiate women's soccer team over the course of the 2014 season. Observational and prospective study. Virginia Tech women's soccer games and practices. Twenty-six collegiate level women's soccer players with a mean player age of 19 ± 1. Participating players were instrumented with head impact sensors for biomechanical analysis. Video recordings of each event were used to manually verify each impact sustained. Head impact counts by player position and impact situation. The sensors collected data from a total of 17 865 accelerative events, 8999 of which were classified as head impacts. Of these, a total of 1703 impacts were positively identified (19% of total real impacts recorded by sensor), 90% of which were associated with heading the ball. The average number of impacts per player per practice or game was 1.86 ± 1.42. Exposure to head impact varied by player position. Head impact exposure was quantified through 2 different methods, which illustrated the challenges associated with autonomously collecting acceleration data with head impact sensors. Users of head impact data must exercise caution when interpreting on-field head impact sensor data.