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10:20   Safety & Injury prevention Chair: Veit Senner 10:20 20 mins CAUSATION EVENTS OF STUD LACERATION INJURIES IN RUGBY UNION Bodil Oudshoorn, David James, Marcus Dunn, Heather Driscoll Abstract: Laceration injuries caused by studded footwear attract a high level of media attention in rugby. The injuries are visually shocking and the design of the studded footwear is often targeted as the cause of these injuries. To help mitigate the risk of laceration injuries in rugby union, stud design is regulated by the governing body, World Rugby. Currently the testing protocol for studs, described in the World Rugby standards, are recommended but not mandatory for manufacturers and they lack supporting evidence for their validity. In the protocol the studs are to be tested on skin simulants, such as silicone rubber, and such materials are known to be loading rate dependent. An improved test protocol will require information about impact speed, angle and force. These parameters need to be obtained for injurious situations, which are currently unknown. This research used a questionnaire to identify the play scenarios that resulted in laceration injuries. The questionnaire was answered by 191 amateur rugby players. Of these, 138 (72%) had experienced one or more substantial stud injuries in their career. Closed question responses found that 50.2% of the injuries came from the ruck, and 27.1% of the laceration injuries were sustained during a tackle. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of 80 open ended questionnaire responses about the injury situation was performed in NVivo (v10). Again, the ruck was associated with the highest number of stud laceration injuries in the amateur rugby cohort, with the majority of the respondents describing a deliberate stamp. The tackle was accountable for one-third of the injury situations; the tackler was frequently hit by the boot of the opponent player during a low tackle. It is therefore evident that these two injury scenarios are the dominant cause of laceration injuries. In future studies, the two scenarios identified here will be replicated in simulated play and kinetic and kinematic data of the injury event will be obtained. This will inform test parameters for future assessment of laceration injury risk of stud designs. 10:40 20 mins POSSIBILITIES FOR REAL-TIME DFA BASED INJURY DETECTION AND SKILL LEVEL DIFFERENTIATION Michelle Norris, Ian C Kenny, Robin Healy, Ross Anderson Abstract: Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is applied to running stride time series for the detection of long range correlations. However, there is no concurrent real-time data collection and DFA feedback mechanism. We aimed to verify a running analysis system for production of real-time DFA α values. Data were collected utilising an accelerometer, attached to the tibia. The accelerometer data were transmitted to MATLAB for processing. Results demonstrated DFA α value output < 2 seconds post individual running Epochs, and < 5 seconds post run completion. Our running analysis system provides rapid advanced variability information, important in both training, and injury prevention. 11:00 20 mins FIELD EVALUATION OF A SMALL FORM-FACTOR HEAD IMPACT SENSOR FOR USE IN SOCCER Derek Nevins, Kasee Hildenbrand, Jeff Kensrud, Anita Vasavada, Lloyd Smith Abstract: Concussions in un-helmeted sport are diagnosed at rates comparable to helmeted, but head impacts during un-helmeted play are comparatively understudied. This is due in part to the technological challenges associated with measuring head acceleration during play, but recently small form factor impact sensors have been developed to characterize impacts during participation in un-helmeted sport. This work considers the accuracy of one such sensor in identifying impacts during play. The sensor was attached to the skin over the mastoid process on 8 male high school soccer players who participated in 7 games. Video of the games was captured using four cameras recording at 60 frames per second. Sensor data were synchronized with video recordings, and each impact identified by the sensor in which peak linear acceleration exceeded 10 g was reviewed. Impacts were categorized based on the context of the contact: player contact with the ball, another player or the ground; no noticeable impact on the video but substantial player movement (e.g., deceleration, planting, turning); or no noticeable impact or change in movement (deemed false positive). Sensor accuracy was assessed by quantifying false positive identification by the sensor. Over the course of 7 games, 125 impacts were recorded. Contact with the ball was the most common mode of head acceleration and accounted for 42.4% of recorded impacts. Contact with another player accounted for 16.8% of impacts, and contact with the ground accounted for 5.6% of impacts. 4% of recorded impacts did not have contact with ball, player or ground, but did have substantial player movement noted on video. Review of the video indicated another 39 (31.2%) impacts were spurious (no contact or change in movement). Additional filter elements reduced the proportion of false positives to 13.3%, but eliminated 34 valid impacts. False positive impact magnitudes ranged from 10.0 to 31.5g, indicating that waveform analysis rather than increased thresholds may be required to improve accuracy.