Thump, womp, and wiggle: novel methods of identifying impacts within vibrating environments

Exposure to vibration and exposure to impacts have both been identified as risk factors for back problems. There have been many studies into vibration exposure and impact exposure separately, but there have not been any studies into impacts within vibrating environments. A large obstacle to studying impacts when vibration is present is the fact that we have no formal definition of what is or is not an impact. Therefore, we have developed several mathematical methods of distinguishing an impact within accelerometer data. These methods are the Thump, Womp, and Wiggle Methods. We first evaluated their effectiveness by assuming that the muscle activity of the lower back would increase immediately after an impact and comparing how often we saw this occur between data points selected by our novel impact detection methods and randomly selected points. While we did not see any appreciable differences when we only look at the core metrics generated by our impact detection methods, when we take additional factors such as posture, age, and time since previous impact into account, we do observe significant differences in the likelihood of a muscle response occurring for impacts identified by the Thump and Wiggle Methods. This suggests that these two methods are a step in the right direction, especially since the approach employed by these two methods are similar to one another.