Video corroboration of player incurred impacts using trunk worn sensors among national ice-hockey team members

PURPOSE: Video corroboration of player incurred impacts (PII) using trunk-worn wearable sensors (WS) among national ice-hockey team members. METHODS: 23 members of the U.S. National (NTDP) U18 team consented to procedures approved by EMU Human Subjects Committee. Bioharness-3 (Zephyr, MD) WS recorded occurrences of PII during games and impacts were generated using Impact Processor (Zephyr, MD). Eight players with the top activity levels each game determined by WS, were observed using video and synchronized with game video collected by NTDP staff. Impacts identified by WS of 6–7.9 g (Z3), 8–9.9 g (Z4) and 10+ g (Z5) were used to corroborate PII. Magnitude and duration of each identified impact were compared by category using MANOVA with Tukey post hoc (α = 0.05; SPSS 22.0, IBM, NY). RESULTS: Of 419 on-ice impacts, 358 were confirmed true PII (85.5%), 60 as other non-PII (14.3%) and 1 false positive (0.2%). For 358 PII, 17 (4.1%) were 1) Board contact/no check, 74 (17.7%), 2) Board contact/check, 202 (48.2%), 3) Open ice check, 65 (15.5%), 4) Player fall. Of 60 Non-PII, 19 (4.5%) as 5) other form of player to player event, 16 (3.8%) as 6) Hard Stop, 19 (4.5%) as 7) Slapshots and 6 (1.4%) as 8) other identifiable player events. 160 of the 200 Z3 events were PII (80%), 103 of 110 Z4 events (93.6%) and 95 of 109 Z5 events were PII (87.2%). The magnitude of impacts was not different by category, but the duration of category 6 (Hard stop; .058 s) was lower than categories 2, 4 and 7 (.112, .112, .133 s, respectively, p < .05). CONCLUSION: These data show that using some limited criteria (e.g. impact magnitude and duration), PII can be identified with relatively high accuracy in ice hockey using trunk-worn wearable sensors.