Performance Evaluation of Wrist Guards Under Dynamic Testing

Introduction: Snowboarding, both as an outdoor sport and cultural trend, has grown tremendously over the past three decades. As a result, the number of trauma related injuries and emergency room visits have risen significantly. According to the literature, more than 50% of upper extremity injuries involve the wrist. The primary mechanism of injury is a backwards fall onto outstretched hands, resulting in hyperextension of the wrist. Thus, protective gear in the form of wrist guards has evolved as a means of decreasing the frequency of wrist injury. Clinical and cadaveric studies have supported the use of wrist guards for snowboarding. With the lack of standardization, however, there exists large variation in design and application among commercially available wrist guards. Furthermore, there is a need for mechanical and biomechanical data to assess the performance of such devices. Previous studies have evaluated the performance of wrist guards under impact loading. Though impact data may be useful, it is our opinion that wrist guards undergo low load fatiguing followed by occasional impact loading. Thus, the slow loading of wrist guards serves as a clinically relevant model for the determination of both fatigue and failure when impact conditions arise. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the fatigue performance of commercially available wrist guards. Materials and Methods: Three (3) commercially available wrist guard designs (Figure 1: A, B, C) were selected for evaluation. These included ProTec IPS wrist guard, Santa Fe, CA (N=5), Burton RED Impact wrist guard, Truckee, CA (N=5) and Flexmeter wrist guard, NY, NY (N=5).