Citation

Wu L, Zarnescu L, Nangia V, Cam B, Camarillo D. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 2014; 61(11): 2659-2668.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)

DOI

10.1109/TBME.2014.2320153

PMID

24800918

Abstract

Injury from blunt head impacts causes acute neurological deficits and may lead to chronic neurodegeneration. A head impact detection device can serve both as a research tool for studying head injury mechanisms and a clinical tool for real-time trauma screening. The simplest approach is an acceleration thresholding algorithm, which may falsely detect high-acceleration spurious events such as manual manipulation of the device. We designed a head impact detection system that distinguishes head impacts from non-impacts through two subsystems. First, we use infrared proximity sensing to determine if the mouthguard is worn on the teeth to filter out all offteeth events. Second, on-teeth, non-impact events are rejected using a support vector machine classifier trained on frequency domain features of linear acceleration and rotational velocity. The remaining events are classified as head impacts. In a controlled laboratory evaluation, the present system performed substantially better than a 10g acceleration threshold in head impact detection (98% sensitivity, 99.99% specificity, 99% accuracy, and 99.98% precision, compared to 92% sensitivity, 58% specificity, 65% accuracy, and 37% precision). Once adapted for field deployment by training and validation with field data, this system has the potential to effectively detect head trauma in sports, military service, and other high-risk activities.

Language: en