Quantifying Head Impact Exposure in Collegiate Women's Soccer

Objective: The aim of this study was to quantify head impact exposure for a collegiate women's soccer team over the course of the 2014 season. Design: Observational and prospective study. Setting: Virginia Tech women's soccer games and practices. Participants: Twenty-six collegiate level women's soccer players with a mean player age of 19 ± 1. Interventions: Participating players were instrumented with head impact sensors for biomechanical analysis. Video recordings of each event were used to manually verify each impact sustained. Main Outcome Measures: Head impact counts by player position and impact situation. Results: The sensors collected data from a total of 17 865 accelerative events, 8999 of which were classified as head impacts. Of these, a total of 1703 impacts were positively identified (19% of total real impacts recorded by sensor), 90% of which were associated with heading the ball. The average number of impacts per player per practice or game was 1.86 ± 1.42. Exposure to head impact varied by player position. Conclusions: Head impact exposure was quantified through 2 different methods, which illustrated the challenges associated with autonomously collecting acceleration data with head impact sensors. Users of head impact data must exercise caution when interpreting on-field head impact sensor data.