A group of students supervised by professor Dave Andrews in the Faculty of Human Kinetics aims to understand just how frequently head impacts occur during youth hockey games.

Besides the potential to prevent or mitigate brain injury, the project is giving the students experience in research: from conceptualizing a study to reviewing literature to working with data.

It all started during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Dr. Andrews.

“All the research in my lab requires human participants, so we needed to find ways that we could still study athletes while respecting social distancing. A group of undergraduate students, working as part of the Head Impact Research Team in the biomechanics lab, came up with some innovative ways of building on previous head impact research,” he says, mostly in football.

The team begin observing and videorecording hockey games at the Atlas Tube Recreation Centre, tracking every head impact and how they occur — whether they involve the head hitting ice, the boards, or other players.

The next step in the research is to quantify head velocities prior to and following impact, which gives an estimate of impact severity, Andrews says. He is also exploring ways to track player kinematics using technology such as GPS and cameras that use artificial intelligence.

“One day we’d like to work directly with players who are on the receiving end of the impacts we measure, so we can document concussive symptoms and correlate them to biomechanical variables such as head velocity and impact type,” says Andrews.

Learn more in the full article, “Taking aim at head impacts,” published in the Research and Innovation in Action report.