Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS) Proposal # 1230312 Flaura Winston
This proposal seeks funding for the Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS) located at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Funding Requests for Fundamental Research are authorized by an NSF approved solicitation, NSF 11-570. The solicitation invites I/UCRCs to submit proposals for support of industry-defined fundamental research.
Concussions (also known as mild traumatic brain injuries - mTBI) are not only the most common injury sustained by children in crashes but often lead to poor outcomes that affect a child's quality of life. Understanding the biomechanics of mTBI for children goes beyond automotive injury prevention and advances a CChIPS strategic goal of expansion into sports injury prevention. This Fundamental Research proposal addresses industrys need for data to drive safety innovation on preventing mTBI in children. The primary objectives in this proposed research are to: 1) validate the ability of helmet-based sensors to measure the head acceleration of a helmeted youth hockey player and 2) quantify the head biomechanics experienced by youth hockey players across a typical season and correlate these to measured neurocognitive deficits.
By providing an in-depth understanding of injury mechanisms and injury metrics associated with concussion linked with medical data, this research will lead to new ATD (anthropometric test device), injury criteria and testing protocols. These new tools will fuel the cycle of product development for technology to prevent mTBI in children both for the automotive and sports equipment industries. The proposed work will contribute novel data relating engineering metrics to neurological and cognitive outcomes associated with head impacts to the pre-adolescent. This project also facilitates creation of an international site of CChIPS in Sweden and provides a platform for attracting new members from the sports injury prevention industry.
Head injury is the leading cause of death and disability after crashes and is a major focus for the automotive industry. The primary tool used in safety product development, the crash test dummy or anthropometric test device (ATD), is limited in its ability to accurately predict head injury risk, particularly for children. The Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS) has identified a new challenge in advancing ATD design and head injury prevention for children – lack of knowledge for prevention of concussions. Concussions (or mild traumatic brain injuries – mTBI) are the most common injury sustained by children in crashes and often lead to poor outcomes that affect a child’s quality of life. Studying young athletes presents an ideal environment in which to study mTBI due to its frequency and observability. In helmeted athletes, sensors integrated into the helmet can be used to monitor the head acceleration during impacts sustained by the athletes and these mechanical data can be correlated with clinical data to relate engineering metrics to neurological and cognitive outcomes associated with head impacts. As a first step, the accuracy of these helmet based sensors must be quantified and thus this was the focus of this Fundamental Research Supplement. Specifically, we quantified differences between head acceleration measured by the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System for ice hockey and reference head acceleration measured by the ATD. An ATD head and neck was fit with a helmet instrumented with the HIT system, rigidly attached to a mounting surface and impacted at various speeds and directions with three different interfaces between the ATD head and helmet. Differences between the helmet-based peak accelerations and reference values was quantified, and the influence of impact direction and helmet-head interface evaluated. We then evaluated the accuracy of second helmet based sensor, one that was equipped with accelerometers to measure linear acceleration as well as gyroscopes to measure rotational acceleration. A similar test matrix was conducted as in the first evaluation exploring the effect of impact direction. However, as it became clearer that there were real world usage characteristics that could potentially impact the accuracy of the system, an expanded test matrix was evaluated. Specifically, we explored the effect of sensor location, impacting surface, and helmet geometry/construction. This study represents the first comprehensive evaluation of the accuracy of the helmet-based systems for ice hockey. Several conclusions were reached: 1) while the correlation between helmet based accelerometer systems and reference peak resultant acceleration was strong, it was not 1:1, 2) this relationship varied by head surface, impact direction, helmet geometry, and sensor location, and 3) the system error was larger than previously reported. This research provided a critical message of caution and conveyed that care needs to be used in interpretation of data from on field usage of these sensors. By highlighting that significant measurement error may exist and that accuracy varies by important real world characteristics, our research confirmed that it is premature to use such technology as a diagnostic tool but rather it is best used as another set of eyes that can direct a trainer, parent or coach to further evaluate a given player. In addition to providing fundamental knowledge, this proposal launched a new chapter of CChIPS by: 1) stimulating research collaboration between Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, CChIPS original academic site, and The Ohio State University, CChIPS’ second site; 2) expanding CChIPS research internationally by including funding and scientists from Chalmers University, Sweden; and 3) strategically extending the CChIPS research portfolio into an emerging area of pediatric injury prevention, sports injury. Lastly, this women-led project supported doctoral research of a female NSF Graduate Research Fellowship awardee, thus promoting diversity in engineering.
