Comparison of Head Impact Biomechanics across Multiple Sports

<div>Athletes may sustain numerous head impacts during sport, leading to potential neurological consequences. Wearable sensors enable real-world head impact data collection, offering insight into sport-specific brain injury mechanisms. Most instrumented mouthguard studies focus on a single sport, lacking a quantitative comparison of head impact biomechanics across sports. Additionally, direct comparison of prior studies can be challenging due to variabilities in methodology and data processing. Therefore, we gathered head impact data across multiple sports and processed all data using a uniform processing pipeline to enable direct comparisons of impact biomechanics. Our aim was to compare peak kinematics, impulse durations, and head impact directionality across ice hockey, American football, rugby, and soccer. We found that American football had the highest magnitude of head impact kinematics and observed directionality differences in linear and angular kinematics between sports. On the other hand, there were no significant differences in impulse durations, which was unexpected given the different impacting objects and protective equipment across sports. In future work, we aim to expand our dataset to better match sports for understanding the influence of sex, equipment, and playstyle on head impact biomechanics.</div>