Reliability, Validity and Utility of Inertial Sensor Systems for Postural Control Assessment in Sport Science and Medicine Applications: A Systematic Review.

The application of wearable inertial sensors for sports science and medicine postural control applications is an evolving field. To date, research has primarily focused on evaluating the validity and reliability of a heterogeneous set of assessment protocols, in a laboratory environment. While researchers have begun to investigate their utility in clinical use cases such as concussion and musculoskeletal injury, most studies have leveraged small sample sizes, are of low quality and use a variety of descriptive variables, assessment protocols and sensor-mounting locations. Future research should evaluate the clinical utility of these systems in large high-quality prospective cohort studies to establish the role they may play in injury risk identification, diagnosis and management. This systematic review was registered with the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews on 10 August 2018 (PROSPERO registration: CRD42018106363): https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.php?RecordID=106363 .