Risk of Injury System based on Knee Kinematics (RISKK)

Young athletes involved in pivoting and jumping sports are at high risk of tearing the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) with 200,000/year occurring in the United States. ACL tears lead to short-term reduction in function and long-term morbidity, including post-traumatic knee arthritis. Injury prevention interventions have promising results, decreasing ACL injuries up to 60 per cent, however low (11 per cent) adherence is reported with efficacy strongly correlated with adherence. Readily deployable screening tools may provide objective injury risk estimates, potentially motivating improved adherence in intervention programs.

We developed a field-ready portable markerless computer vision-based system, Risk of Injury System based on Knee Kinematics (RISKK). RISKK uses a 3D camera for on court/field data acquisition and automatically analyzes functional tests (drop vertical jump, distance hop, timed hop) quickly (<5 minutes), without expert input, at low cost. Initial field testing produced promising results demonstrating measurement agreement with a gold standard multi-camera system (Vicon) and good reliability.

Once established, the ability to assess functional tests at low cost and at scale will have a paradigm shifting effect, from reactive to proactive. This will encourage early efforts in injury prevention and detection in young athletes, allowing routine screening, training assessment, and clinical decision support.