Developing and Implementing a Force Production Analysis Algorithm to Assess People with Concussions

The twofold goal of this study was to show how a specially designed algorithm can assist in the assessment of a concussion's effect on movement and to investigate whether subjects who had suffered a head injury demonstrated deficiencies in terms of completing various force production tasks. Twelve healthy subjects and 5 people who had histories of head injuries participated in this study. Each subject was presented with 4 different targets on a computer monitor and asked to create force trajectories by gradually applying pressure to a load cell while maintaining a constant slope of force production. Specially written MATLAB programs were used to calculate various parameters of force production trajectories. Healthy subjects' means and standard deviations were compared individually with those of head-injured subjects. Only 1 head-injured subject showed any significant departure from the means of the healthy subjects. However, this person had suffered the most severe trauma of the 5 injured subjects, indicating that this task may be a quantifier of head injury severity. This investigation demonstrated how the algorithm may be used to assess severity of head injury and to track recovery.