Bridging the gap in ACL injury prevention with FAME

For decades, there has been significant research interest in preventing anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in sports. Special training programs have been developed to prevent these injuries, and such programs have been shown to be effective in scientific studies. However, these programs are not as effective in practice (as expected from these studies), which means the number of ACL injuries remains at a high level. From our perspective, the main reason for this is that we do not yet understand how exactly these training programs prevent ACL injuries and how they can be best adapted to different sports and training conditions. Our research project aims to address this challenge and gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of existing training programs. We use mobile measurement devices to examine and simulate the movements of athletes on the field. Our specific goals are: 1) Developing and validating a mobile system called FAME, which can measure the movements and stresses on the entire body, including muscles and the ACL, during sports activities. 2) Applying FAME in football to investigate the effects of an 8-week ACL injury prevention training program on movement strategies during directional changes in actual game situations. 3) Conducting experiments with "virtual athletes" to determine which training components are most effective in protecting the ACL. Our method involves analyzing the movements of athletes using a model of the skeleton, muscles, and ligaments. Motion signals are measured using wearable sensors and fed into the model. This allows us to replicate and simulate the movements to understand how they impact the loading of the ACL. The goal of our study is to determine whether the ACL injury prevention training program actually improves movement strategies and muscle activity during games by providing better protection for the ACL. Based on our findings, we aim to provide recommendations for future training programs to make them even more effective and adaptable. This study is innovative because, for the first time, it allows us to estimate the forces on the ACL during real sports activities. By gaining a better understanding of how ACL injury prevention training programs work, we hope to reduce the number of athletes affected by this type of injury in the future.