Item Details

title

AN ON-FIELD EVALUATION OF HEAD KINEMATIC SENSORS AND PRACTICE DRILL CHARACTERISTICS

author

Holcomb, Ty Davis

abstract

Football is a high intensity collision sport with over 3 million participants competing across various levels each year. A growing body of research has indicated that repetitive, subconcussive head impact exposure (HIE) may have a negative effect on brain health in football athletes. The general public has become increasingly aware of concussions in sports, and more are seeing concussions and brain health as a public health priority. Sports organizations are feeling more pressure to alter existing rules and regulations to increase athlete safety, specifically, limiting the amount of contact between athletes at practice. There is a critical need for biomechanical data to help inform evidence-based interventions and decisions surrounding regulations in football. In this thesis, HIE data collected simultaneously from the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) system and an instrumented mouthpiece-based sensor in a sample of high school football players are compared and the differences in the kinematics among paired events were examined. Additionally, head acceleration data collected from practice sessions of two youth football teams was collected and head acceleration magnitude was evaluated by drill intensity, drill classification, and drill type. This research adds to the growing body of research surrounding HIE in football. The results presented in this thesis aim to inform research studies utilizing head acceleration sensors as well as future interventions to reduce head impact exposure in football.

subject

Football

Head Kinematics

HIT System

Mouthpiece

Practices

Sensors

contributor

Urban, Jillian E (committee chair)

Stitzel, Joel D (committee member)

Rowson, Steve (committee member)

date

2022-07-11T19:17:41Z (accessioned)

2022 (issued)

degree

Biomedical Engineering (discipline)

embargo

2027-05-14 (terms)

2027-05-14 (liftdate)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/101024 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis