Developed at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, as part of research into elite contact-sport athlete welfare.
Conceived the study, developed the IFS methodology, performed the data analysis, drafted the manuscript.
Data collection, study design, critical revision.
Data collection, study design, critical revision.
Study design, neuropsychological interpretation, critical revision, supervision, funding.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
The ice-hockey measurements described under Evidence were conducted as part of Sustainable Careers in Elite Contact Sports (SUCCESS), funded by the Research Council of Finland under the Academy Programme for Sport Science and Physical Activity (ACTIVE), grant number 361442. Development of the IFS methodology itself received no specific funding.
The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Helsinki University Hospital (HUS/5422/2024, 3 July 2024) and conducted under the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed written consent from all participants.
The complete event-level research dataset cannot be made public, as recorded events link to identifiable players and match participation. De-identified demonstration data — a random selection of events from several women's ice-hockey games — together with a versioned executable capable of processing up to 20 ACT sensor events per run, expected outputs, and operating instructions, are available at DOI:10.5281/zenodo.21890128. Requests for additional research data are considered by the corresponding author, subject to participant confidentiality, ethical approval, and a data-use agreement.
J. Launes is named as an inventor on a pending patent application filed with the Finnish Patent and Registration Office, covering methods for extracting and representing waveform-derived features from wearable head-impact sensor data, including aspects of the IFS methodology — filed before the manuscript was submitted. No licensing income or commercial revenue has been received. The other authors declare no competing interests. Because of this, the source code and certain exact mathematical feature definitions are proprietary and cannot be released publicly; the demonstration executable linked above is provided instead, so the method's outputs can be inspected and reproduced on sample data without disclosing the underlying implementation.
IFS describes a waveform — it doesn't record one, and isn't tied to any particular device. The measurements referenced throughout this site were captured with the ACT Head Impact Tracker Pro, worn at the mastoid process, a separate and independent product. act-tracker.com ↗
For research collaboration, data-access requests, or questions about the methodology, send a message — it reaches the corresponding author directly.