Foul tip impact attenuation of baseball catcher masks using head impact metrics

Abstract

Currently, no scientific consensus exists on the relative safety of catcher mask styles and materials. Due to differences in mass and material properties, the style and material of a catcher mask influences the impact metrics observed during simulated foul ball impacts. The catcher surrogate was a Hybrid III head and neck equipped with a six degree of freedom sensor package to obtain linear accelerations and angular rates. Four mask styles were impacted using an air cannon for six 30 m/s and six 35 m/s impacts to the nasion. To quantify impact severity, the metrics peak linear acceleration, peak angular acceleration, Head Injury Criterion, Head Impact Power, and Gadd Severity Index were used. An Analysis of Covariance and a Tukey's HSD Test were conducted to compare the least squares mean between masks for each head injury metric. For each injury metric a P-Value less than 0.05 was found indicating a significant difference in mask performance. Tukey's HSD test found for each metric, the traditional style titanium mask fell in the lowest performance category while the hockey style mask was in the highest performance category. Limitations of this study prevented a direct correlation from mask testing performance to mild traumatic brain injury.

Efficacy of Softball Face Masks at Reducing Linear and Rotational Head Acceleration

“…This control trial was necessary so the masked trials could later be compared to it and show the reduction in head acceleration values. Each trial was performed at the same frontal impact location at the center of the face between the eyebrows and nose, mirroring previous studies that used the same location to ensure that the maximum amount of energy was transferred from softballs into the masks (Eckersley, 2018). Six trials were conducted on each face mask to increase the accuracy of the impact data.…”