Reliability of wearable sensors to assess impact metrics during sport-specific tasks
Julie P. Burland, Jereme Outerleys, Christian Lattermann, Irene S. Davis
Abstract
There is little information on the reliability of inertial measurement units for capturing impact load metrics during sport-specific movements. The purpose of this study is to determine the reliability of the Blue Trident IMU sensors in measuring impact load, step count and cumulative bone stimulus during a series of soccer-related tasks. Ten healthy recreational soccer players (age: 27.9 ± 2.18; height: 1.77 ± 0.10 m; mass: 79.02 ± 13.07 kg) volunteered for a 3-visit study and performed 4 tasks. Bilateral impact load, total number of steps and cumulative bone stimulus during the tasks were collected. Data were sampled using a dual-g sensor. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC3,1) with 95% confidence intervals assessed between-day reliability. Impact load (0.58–0.89) and cumulative bone stimulus (0.90–0.97) had good to excellent reliability across tasks. ICC values for right/left step count were good to excellent during acceleration-deceleration (0.728–0.837), change direction (0.734–0.955) and plant/cut manoeuvres (0.701–0.866) and fair to good during the ball kick (0.588–0.683). This suggests that wearable sensors can reliably measure the cumulative impact load during outdoor functional movements; however, kicking manoeuvres are less reliable. Measuring impact load in the field expands the ability to capture more ecologically valid data.