Item Details

title

Characterization of Head Impact Exposure in Youth Soccer

author

Tomblin, Brian

abstract

With millions of youth athletes playing soccer worldwide, the safety of these athletes has become a global public health concern. Impacts from heading soccer balls and colliding with other players contribute to high rates of concussion in the sport, especially among female athletes, as well as repetitive non-concussive head impacts that do not result in signs and symptoms of concussion. National soccer federations have attempted to reduce the number of head impacts youth athletes experience by regulating the number of ball headers they can perform at younger ages, with a complete ban for athletes under the age of 11; however, these rules may not be fully informed by biomechanical evidence in youth soccer players. The majority of soccer head impact research has focused on the high school and collegiate levels of play, with the limited youth studies utilizing only in-lab experiments or brief recording periods on-field. Many of these studies additionally used head impact sensors within skullcaps, headbands, and skin patches, all of which have been shown to have accuracy limitations due to poor coupling with the skull. This motivated the development of an instrumented mouthpiece sensor with improved skull coupling that can be easily worn by athletes during a practice or game. This thesis describes the utilization of these novel mouthpieces to characterize head impact exposure experienced by youth female soccer athletes in a single season and evaluate the effect of heading technique on head kinematics measured during on-field headers.

subject

Concussion

Head Impact Exposure

Head Kinematics

Non-concussive Impacts

Pediatric

Soccer

contributor

Urban, Jillian E (committee chair)

Stitzel, Joel D (committee member)

Miles, Christopher M (committee member)

date

2019-09-05T08:35:25Z (accessioned)

2024-08-15T08:30:07Z (available)

2019 (issued)

degree

Biomedical Engineering (discipline)

embargo

2024-08-15 (terms)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/94319 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis