What Data Gets Collected - and What It Actually Means

So your child's team has started using Prevent's instrumented mouthguards. At some point, a coach or athletic trainer may show you a dashboard, a report, or a text alert with numbers on it - and if you're like most parents, your first reaction might be: okay, but what am I actually looking at?

Let's break down what's being measured, why each piece matters, and how it fits together into something a parent (not just a biomechanics researcher) can actually use.

The six things being measured on every impact

Every time an athlete takes a hit significant enough to register, the system captures six pieces of information:

Peak linear acceleration. This is the straight-line force of the hit - essentially, how hard the head was struck. It's measured in "g-force" (multiples of gravity), the same basic unit you'd hear used to describe a car crash or a roller coaster.

Peak angular acceleration. This measures rotational force - how much the hit caused the head to twist or spin. Research over the past decade has increasingly pointed to rotational forces as a key contributor to brain injury, sometimes even more so than straight-line force. A moderate hit that causes a lot of rotation can matter just as much as a harder hit that doesn't.

Impact location. Where on the head the hit landed - front, back, side, top. Location can affect both how the impact is interpreted and how it's used to inform technique conversations with athletes.

Direction of force. The angle the force came from, which pairs with location to build a fuller picture of exactly what happened.

Impact count. A simple running tally: how many impacts has this athlete absorbed, in this practice, this game, this week, this season.

Impact load intensity / cumulative workload. This is where individual hits stop being individual and start being a pattern. Instead of just looking at "was there one big hit," this tracks how impacts accumulate over time for a given athlete.

Why the cumulative picture matters as much as any single hit

It's natural to focus on the scary-looking single number - the one big hit that triggers an alert. That's important, and it's exactly the kind of thing that should get an athlete pulled aside for an evaluation.

But a lot of the real value of this data shows up over time, not in any one moment. An athlete who takes a steady string of moderate impacts across a season is experiencing something different than an athlete who takes one hard hit and nothing else. Neither pattern is automatically "bad" - contact sports involve contact - but having the actual record means coaches and medical staff aren't relying on memory or guesswork to answer questions like: has this athlete been taking more contact than usual lately? Does practice contact intensity need adjusting? Is this athlete's exposure trending in a direction worth a conversation?

This is often described as tracking "athlete workload" - treating head impact exposure a bit like teams already treat pitch counts for pitchers or minutes played for an athlete returning-from-injury athlete. It's one more data point in the broader picture of how much physical stress an athlete is absorbing.

What a report might actually show you

Depending on how your child's organization has set things up, you (or team staff) might see a dashboard showing:

None of this data is a diagnosis. No number on that screen tells you whether your child has a concussion. What it tells you an a user is this is worth a closer look, or this athlete's exposure this month looks different than normal - the kind of objective flag that used to depend entirely on someone noticing something from the sideline.

Who sees this data, and why that's worth asking about

Because this is health-adjacent data about a minor, it's a completely fair question to ask your child's team or school: who has access to this information, how is it stored, and how long is it kept? Reputable programs using this technology should be able to answer clearly - and if you're a parent evaluating whether your child's team should adopt this technology, that's a good question to bring to the athletic department directly.

What's next

Numbers are only reassuring if you trust where they came from. In Part 4, we'll look at the research behind this technology - where it originated, how it's been validated by independent universities and medical institutions, and why organizations like World Rugby and the U.S. Department of Defense have adopted it.

This post is part of Prevent Biometrics' educational series on instrumented mouthguard (iMG) technology. Read Part 2: How iMG Technology Works, or continue to Part 4: The Science and Validation Behind iMG.