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Shepherd, Keili

University of British Columbia

Soccer players experience repetitive subconcussive impacts during heading, which may cause long-term neurological damage. Neck muscle strength and activation have been suggested to mitigate head impacts and decrease the risk of brain injury. Specifically, increasing neck muscle activation before and during head impacts may decrease head kinematics parameters related to brain injury. However, studies have primarily investigated muscle activation in laboratory environments, where head impacts are typically of lower magnitude than real-life events. We recruited 10 participants with previous soccer heading experience and instrumented them with wearable sensors to collect neck muscle activation and head impact kinematics during soccer headers. Before conducting participant experiments, we created a custom wearable sensor system and designed a circuit to time synchronize muscle activity and kinematics. We characterized neck muscle activation, timing, magnitude, and co-contraction patterns using electromyography (EMG) and peak head kinematics using a custom instrumented mouthguard (iMG). We found that the neck muscles were actively engaged around the time of impact, and that peak activation magnitude increased when soccer balls were delivered at higher speeds. However, the timing and magnitude of the activation were not always maximized for head stabilization. Our findings suggest players may benefit from training to improve the timing of muscle engagement to maximize their stabilization potential and reduce head kinematics.

Text

2024-03-26

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87636

Biomedical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/