Intermountain Press Release

Murray—Scientists at The Orthopedic Specialty Hospital (TOSH) are seeking Utah teens to participate in an innovative new study using high-tech equipment to determine whether they can predict and prevent future injuries in young athletes -well before they actually suffer the injury.

The study is the first of its kind in the country to target young athletes' future risk of injury.

TOSH researchers will use a high-tech portable force plate to measure athletes' power output and stability in hopes that they can assess individual risk of injury and improve their performance. The portable force plate can measure an athlete's vertical, front-to-back, and side-to-side forces as they exercise, and when combined with special video analysis software, can determine how stable an individual athlete really is.

The portable force plate is 30x40 inches in size and is connected to a computer that measures and charts how high one can jump, how much power one produces, and how stable you might one may be. Dartfish video analysis, much like technology used during recent Olympics, captures sequential movements and shows problem areas in real-time.

The exciting aspect of these new integrated research tools is that they are far less costly and time intensive than traditional laboratory-based technology - which can cost more than $300,000 and take over an hour to assess the stability of a single subject. Only seven force plates like the one TOSH is using exist in the U.S. This is one of the first studies of its kind set to target risk of injury.

The new DartPower integrated force plate and video technology costs less than $20,000 is portable, and takes less than 10 minutes to administer the stability test.

"The more dynamically stable an athlete is, the less likely they'll be to get into a position that may cause an injury," says TOSH researcher Steve Swanson, M.S. "If we can determine the "at-risk" population of young athletes early, we can get them into a training program to correct the behavior that could lead to a serious injury later."

TOSH will test 2,000 athletes, ages 14 to 16 years old, and track them over a two-year period to determine if the data they collect from the DartPower analysis can accurately be used to determine if a person is already at risk of an injury.

"This is a significant research project for coaches and trainers," says Jim Walker, PhD., director of TOSH's Institute for Sport Science and Medicine. "With the force plate and the video analysis we can actually show athletes the specific movements that could lead to serious injury. Then we set up specific training protocols to correct the movements and improve their performance. It's a huge bonus to the athletes we train to be able to improve their performance and, at the same time, reduce their likelihood for injury."