Rebecca Gow: using bioengineering to study movement and injury prevention in athletes

 By Kiran Kumar

Rebecca Gow as an undergraduate
rugby player. Now, she's using
bioengineering tools to prevent
injury in athletes.

UC San Diego bioengineering graduate student Rebecca Gow is currently working on a project to study movement competency in athletes, specifically female soccer players. Movement competency refers to how a certain movement or physical task is performed, and how it can correlate to injury. Gow, a student in bioengineering Professor Andrew McCulloch’s Cardiac Mechanics Research Laboratory, was particularly excited to contribute to this research since she’s been an athlete her whole life.

“I played softball for about 12 years, all the way up through high school, and then played rugby in college,” said Gow. “I was very much interested in conducting research with athletes.”

After receiving Institutional Review Board approval, Gow and researchers in McCulloch’s lab will work directly with athletes to study movement competency using a novel screening approach. These movement screen tests are crucial for training and injury prevention; however, most existing screening tools are visual assessments, and can miss minor functional deficits when observing movement competency and identifying asymmetries and postural deficiencies in athletes.

“Movement quality is currently assessed visually so this can be subjective and affected by how well trained the reviewer is,” said Gow.

Instead, Gow will use Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to provide a less subjective, mathematical alternative to the existing visual screen tests.  IMUs are small devices used to determine the orientation of, for example, a body segment. Athletes will wear them while performing a set sequence of actions and the data will be used to calculate joint angles. With a physics based analysis, this data will help explain the link between movement patterns and incidence of injury.

Another benefit of using IMUs is that these movement tests could then be done in a natural athletic setting, instead of having athletes come into a lab for a traditional motional analysis screening.

Ultimately, this new way to study movement could explain how different movement patterns lead to injury in the short and long term, helping prevent injury for athletes, as well as people performing everyday tasks.

Gow met McCulloch at a bioengineering department social, where she was also introduced to the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, which this project is part of. The Alliance is a scientific collaboration among six universities including UC San Diego, that aims to transform human health on a global scale through the discovery and translation of the biological principles underlying human performance. For Gow, that means playing a role in injury prevention.

“I think that the Alliance is a great opportunity to make connections and collaborate with researchers all over the United States to do groundbreaking research,” said Gow. “It is an incredible group of people that I can learn more from.”