Lead PI:
Center Researchers:
Collaborating Partners
- Mitchell Abrams, PhD
- Adam Mehlenbacher, AuD (Durham VAMC; Duke Department of Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences – Consulting Associate)
- Kyle Matthews, Director of Firmware Engineering (Blur Product Development)
- Community Partners – local high school, local middle school age youth football program, local youth football program
Funding:
Pilot funding provided by the Duke Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation.
Other funding sources:
- Duke Bass Connections – Brain & Society Theme – [6/15/2015 to 6/30/2026] – “Oculomotor Response as an Objective Measurement for Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in the Pediatric Population”
- Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS) Research Incubator Award – [6/15/2015 to 5/14/2017]
The Challenge
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), or concussion, is a major societal issue across all ages and is associated with activities ranging from athletic activity, to motor vehicle crashes and falls. Sports-related concussions are particularly notable, with an estimated incidence of 1.8-3.8 million per year, and account for between 30-60% of all pediatric concussions.
How do student-athlete reported weekly athletic activity and exposure (non-wearable) correlate to wearable head impact exposure kinematics both on the individual and cohort level?
Our objective is to develop a framework that interacts with these data from inception to delivery to advanced statistical and computational models (e.g., digital twins, ML) where we can seamlessly engage research questions that leverage these data sources to find, track and treat youth head injury.
Our Solution
Our project sought to develop a framework suitable for interacting with a wide array of data sources relevant for characterizing the head impact exposure environment experienced by youth athletes along with complementary data sources relevant for characterizing the health of these youth athletes in both injury and non-injury states.
The Luck Lab (Injury Biomechanics Laboratory), in collaboration with the Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation, leveraged an existing set of wearable and non-wearable data from an ongoing study investigating head impact exposure, injury and the underlying mechanisms that result in concussive outcomes in youth/adolescent student-athletes to investigate head injury.
