results should at least raise warning flags to medical
professionals to implement preventive measures to
ensure that the player is physically and cognitively
healthy given his history of concussion. The aim of
these preventive measures is to reduce the amount of
undetected and unreported incidences of concussion.
For youth athletes, these undetected injuries could
have a detrimental impact on their cognitive
development.
Long-term monitoring of these players is crucial
in identifying players who might exhibit signs of
cognitive and motor deficits without being clinically
diagnosed with concussion. Coaches and medical
professionals at the youth level often lack the
resources and training to deal with the complexity of
concussion detection since symptoms do not
manifest themselves unless major injury occurs.
Therefore, it is essential to provide these
professionals with simple metrics to easily monitor
the change in the motor and cognitive dysfunction of
these players throughout the season. Multi-tasking is
an essential element of sports; therefore, it is
imperative to monitor players’ performance when
subjecting to these types of tasks. In this study, we
aim to develop a testing protocol using a kinematic-
based dual-task paradigm to quickly and non-
invasively monitor high-risk players throughout the
season to track their motor and cognitive functions.
The ultimate goal would be to build a cognitive and
biomechanical passport for each player using data
collected longitudinally with a protocol such as the
one presented here. Then, the performance of each
athlete could be compared with that of his/her peers,
but also with that of him/herself. Any abrupt
changes could be considered as tell-tale signs that
mTBI has occurred. Since the test is also performed
without the cognitive tasks, the motor development
or alterations could be taken into consideration in
the detection of possible mTBI.
While the sample size is a limiting factor in this
study, we hope to test and monitor more players pre
and in-season to develop more comprehensive
metrics to measure the motor and cognitive function
of these at-risk athletes in future studies. This could
include simple performance metrics, such as the
ones presented here, but also full-body pattern
recognitions using more sophisticated techniques
such as machine learning, neural or Bayesian
network. Furthermore, as we are developing the
algorithms to detect mTBI, we are also exploring
hardware alternatives that could capture full-body
kinematics in a markerless fashion easily, and with
lower costs, so that such a system could eventually
become accessible to teams. Still, the present results
are encouraging, and are in line with previous
research using more conventional (yet more
complicated and time consuming) approaches
(Cossette et al., 2014). We hope to provide coaches
and medical professionals with a more simple, fast
and fully automated tool to objectively identify at-
risk players, and provide preventive care so as to
avoid the unhealthy consequences of multiple
undetected concussions and their impact long-term
health.
5 CONCLUSIONS
An automated kinematic-based dual-task paradigm
provided a promising testing mechanism to detect
the onset of concussion. This novel approach allows
for the monitoring of players over the entire season
and provides faster assessment of concussion effects
than traditional neurocognitive tests.
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