Screening High School Female Athletes for Knee Injury Risk

Three weeks before classes officially begin at a local high school near Binghamton, NY, the dedicated female athletes take to the field in order to prepare for the start of the fall athletic season.
Unfortunately, as the season progresses so will the likelihood of knee related injuries, which has drastically increased over the last few years and is turning into an epidemic!
Derek Holt (a graduate student in the Bioengineering Department at Binghamton U) and I have set up camp in the high school’s fitness center with the goal of using a new device from Sonostics called MyoWave to collect data that corresponds to the force exerted by the quads and hamstrings during a specific set of exercises.
The first exercise attempts to recreate the natural landing position of each individual’s vertical jump. In order to do this we initially had the girls perform a vertical jump and ensured that upon landing:
1. Their feet remained stationary; and
2. They exaggerated the landing portion of the jump.


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We had them mimic just the landing (which in some instance resembles a squat) for 6 reps while the sensors we had placed over their quadriceps and hamstring muscles took force measurements using vibromyography, which converts muscle vibration to effort using a technique called wavelet packet analysis.
For the second exercise, we had the girls standing in front of a line of tape and reaching down across their body to pick up a pencil. We were interested in the force generated (by their hamstrings and quads) due to inward knee rotation of the sensored leg. This exercise was useful because it was easy to explain, easy to perform, and gave us the same inward knee rotation, we hypothesized, that athletes use when making sharp cuts and turns.


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It has been a lot of fun and many of the athletes enjoyed this unique experience. During setup we had several references to “Bionic Woman” as the girls felt “empowered” to be some of the first athletes testing out MyoWave.
So far, for this study we have screened 80 girls at the high school and hope to collect data from as many as athletes as we can get before their competitive seasons begin. In the near future we plan to expand the screening to include athletes from other high schools in the Southern Tier as well as those from Binghamton University.
We hope that the data acquired and analyzed from this group of athletes could serve as a valuable muscle balance diagnostic tool for predicting knee injury, and that athletic trainers will be able to utilize this data to develop more efficient training regimens that result in lower incidence of knee injury.
Upon initial analysis we are seeing a correlation between athletes who have had a prior knee injury and the time it takes for the quads to reach peak force, however we are still in the preliminary stages and a full analysis is yet to come.

Dear Claire,
Am very interested in being kept up-to-date and am specifically interested in the data you collect on the younger girls/boys (inmature bones).
I have some ideas on how to use this data and possibly this test mechanism for future uses.

keep us informed.

Esther

Hi Esther,

Thanks for your interests. You can go to my website and blog to find more information. Please feel free to discuss with us.
Here is the link:Sonostics

Fascinating research Claire, have you controlled for other factors like shoes, orthotic inserts, and the material that is being jumped on?