COMPARISON OF HEAD IMPACT MEASUREMENT DATA COLLECTED DURING ROUTINE PARTICIPATION OF DIVISION III COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYERS

摘要

In recent years there has been a steady rise in the number of commercially available products that measure head impactbiomechanical data in athletes. While some sensors are more suited for personal use (i.e. inform of significant head impacts),others are more appropriate for research purposes, outputting a variety of biomechanical metrics and time-based signals. Thegoal of the study was to compare the subconcussive head impact history recorded by two commercially available productssuitable for research purposes. Head impacts were recorded using the xPatch (189 participants) during the 2013 football seasonand Head Impact Telemetry System (HITS) (197 participants) during the 2015 football season. Significant differences wereseen for both sensors in the frequency of impacts based on player position. However, fewer differences were seen between thefrequency of recorded impacts when comparing between sensors for a specific player position. The average resultant peaklinear acceleration showed no significant difference between the sensors or player position (xPatch – 26.87g, HITS – 25.98g).However, the resultant peak rotational acceleration was significantly different between the sensors (xPatch – 4785.36rad/s2,HITS – 1116.28rad/s2). This study shows that different commercially available sensors capture reasonably similar data forfrequency of impacts and linear acceleration but differ in rotational acceleration data. To fully assess the role of low-levelimpacts on cognitive health, it is important to capture accurate biomechanical data of these impacts.