COMPARISON OF A HEAD MOUNTED IMPACT MEASUREMENT DEVICE TO THE HYBRID III ANTHROPOMORPHIC TESTING DEVICE IN A CONTROLLED LABORATORY SETTING

Reports estimate that 1.6 to 3.8 million cases of concussion occur in sports and recreation each year in the United States. Despite continued efforts to reduce the occurrence of concussion, the rate of diagnosis continues to increase. The mechanisms of concussion are thought to involve linear and rotational head accelerations and velocities. One method of quantifying the kinematics experienced during sport participation is to place measurement devices into the athlete's helmet or directly on the athlete's head. The purpose of this research to determine the accuracy of a head mounted device for measuring the head accelerations experienced by the wearer. This will be accomplished by identifying the error in Peak Linear Acceleration (PLA), Peak Rotational Acceleration (PRA) and Peak Rotational Velocity (PRV) of the device. Laboratory study. A helmeted Hybrid III 50th percentile male headform was impacted via a pneumatic ram from the front, side, rear, front oblique and rear oblique at speeds from 1.5 to 5 m/s. The X2 Biosystems xPatch® (Seattle, WA) sensor was placed on the headform's right side at the approximate location of the mastoid process. Measures of PLA, PRA, PRV from the xPatch ® and Hybrid III were analyzed for Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Absolute and Relative Error (AE, RE). Seventy-six impacts were analyzed. All measures of correlation, fixed through the origin, were found to be strong: PLA R =0.967 p