Identification of head impact locations, speeds, and force based on head kinematics

Abstract

Objective: Head impact information including impact directions, speeds and force are important to study traumatic brain injury, design and evaluate protective gears. This study presents a deep learning model developed to accurately predict head impact information, including location, speed, orientation, and force, based on head kinematics during helmeted impacts. Methods: Leveraging a dataset of 16,000 simulated helmeted head impacts using the Riddell helmet finite element model, we implemented a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to process the head kinematics: tri-axial linear accelerations and angular velocities. Results: The models accurately predict the impact parameters describing impact location, direction, speed, and the impact force profile with R2 exceeding 70% for all tasks. Further validation was conducted using an on-field dataset recorded by instrumented mouthguards and videos, consisting of 79 head impacts in which the impact location can be clearly identified. The deep learning model significantly outperformed existing methods, achieving a 79.7% accuracy in identifying impact locations, compared to lower accuracies with traditional methods (the highest accuracy of existing methods is 49.4%). Conclusion: The precision underscores the model's potential in enhancing helmet design and safety in sports by providing more accurate impact data. Future studies should test the models across various helmets and sports on large in vivo datasets to validate the accuracy of the models, employing techniques like transfer learning to broaden its effectiveness.

References in corpus (8)

• Validation and Comparison of Instrumented Mouthguards for Measuring Head Kinematics and Assessing Brain Deformation in Football Impacts
• Deep Learning Head Model for Real-time Estimation of Entire Brain Deformation in Concussion
• Relationship between brain injury criteria and brain strain across different types of head impacts can be different
• Predictive Factors of Kinematics in Traumatic Brain Injury from Head Impacts Based on Statistical Interpretation
• Kinematics clustering enables head impact subtyping for better traumatic brain injury prediction
• Rapidly and accurately estimating brain strain and strain rate across head impact types with transfer learning and data fusion
• Denoising instrumented mouthguard measurements of head impact kinematics with a convolutional neural network
• Toward more accurate and generalizable brain deformation estimators for traumatic brain injury detection with unsupervised domain adaptation