2025/08/10 by Yang Wan, Wan, Yang, Benjamin E. Grossman-Ponemona +3 · 1 citation
Medicine · #Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) #Automotive and Human Injury Biomechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Traumatic Brain Injury Research #Traumatic Brain Injury and Neurovascular Disturbances
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.07464
openalex publication_date 2025/08/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) often results from violent head motion or impact. Most prevention strategies explicitly or implicitly rely on motion- or deformation-based injury criteria, both of which require accurate measurements of head motion. We present an algorithm for reconstructing the full acceleration field of a rigid body from measurements obtained by three tri-axial accelerometers and one tri-axial gyroscope. Unlike traditional gyroscope-based methods, which require numerically differentiating noisy angular velocity data, or gyroscope-free methods, which may impose restrictive sensor placement or involve nonlinear optimization, the proposed algorithm recovers angular acceleration and translational acceleration by solving a set of linear equations derived from rigid body kinematics. In the proposed method, the only constraint on sensor placement is that the accelerometers must be non-collinear. We validated the algorithm in controlled soccer heading experiments, demonstrating accurate prediction of accelerations at unsensed locations across trials. The proposed algorithm provides a robust, flexible, and efficient tool for reconstructing rigid body motion, with direct applications in contact sports, robotics, and biomechanical injury prediction.