Athletes may sustain numerous head impacts during sport, leading to potential
neurological consequences. Wearable sensors enable real-world head impact data
collection, offering insight into sport-specific brain injury mechanisms. Most
instrumented mouthguard studies focus on a single sport, lacking a quantitative
comparison of head impact biomechanics across sports. Additionally, direct
comparison of prior studies can be challenging due to variabilities in
methodology and data processing. Therefore, we gathered head impact data across
multiple sports and processed all data using a uniform processing pipeline to
enable direct comparisons of impact biomechanics. Our aim was to compare peak
kinematics, impulse durations, and head impact directionality across ice hockey,
American football, rugby, and soccer. We found that American football had the
highest magnitude of head impact kinematics and observed directionality
differences in linear and angular kinematics between sports. On the other hand,
there were no significant differences in impulse durations, which was unexpected
given the different impacting objects and protective equipment across sports. In
future work, we aim to expand our dataset to better match sports for
understanding the influence of sex, equipment, and playstyle on head impact
biomechanics.
