Heads Up! A Biomechanical Pilot Investigation of Soccer Heading Using Instrumented Mouthguards (iMGs)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Soccer players purposefully head the ball, raising concerns about reduced tolerance to concussion and potential long-term brain health. By combining qualitative video analysis with custom-fit instrumented mouthguards (iMGs), we aimed to categorize header kinematics (peak linear acceleration (PLA) and peak angular acceleration (PAA)) by header type and ball delivery method. iMGs were fitted to 10 male collegiate players for twelve matches. A total of 133 headers were verified and contextualized via video review. The most common header type (38.7%), as well as the preceding ball delivery method (47.4%), was found to be a pass. Approximately one-quarter of header impacts (27.0%) occurred below 10 g. For header type, there were no significant differences in kinematics, with shot attempts having the highest median PLA and PAA. For ball delivery methods, goal kicks had significantly greater PAA than long balls and pass attempts. The current study highlights the utility of qualitative video analysis in combination with real-time head kinematic data from iMGs to understand the mechanism and severity of header impacts. The pilot findings indicate that high-speed ball delivery methods result in higher head kinematics and should be a focus of future mitigation strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".