World Rugby Performance Specifications

Accreditation for Instrumented Mouthguards (iMGs) involves World Rugby's validation process for mouthguards embedded with sensors, ensuring they accurately measure head acceleration events (HAEs) in rugby. This process sets standards to enhance player safety and injury prevention. Recognizing the potential for enhancing player safety, and the increase in commercially available products, World Rugby have developed minimum specifications for their use in rugby.

Accreditation ensures the reliability and effectiveness of iMGs in measuring head impacts accurately, vital in a physically demanding sport like rugby. By establishing criteria, World Rugby aims to promote reliable iMGs across all levels and age groups of the game. Additionally, instrumented mouthguards provide key insight into head acceleration event frequency and magnitude during practice and games, which holds promise in informing the management of chronic load. The potential to signal high-magnitude head impact incidents causing possible concussive events, warranting an off-field assessment, serves as a complementary objective measure alongside the current methods of identification by match officials, team doctors, and independent match-day doctors through direct observation and video review.

Mouthguards are classified as Category 2 personal protective equipment (PPE) in the context of the European Union’s classification system for PPE. As such, World Rugby requires that all instrumented mouthguards must be CE certified by a notified body to be worn at all levels of the game.

Laboratory validation of kinematic measures is required to ensure that head acceleration event (HAE) data recorded on the iMG are reliable and valid. In-lab testing quantifies measurement error through comparison to reference measurements in dummy headforms that are considered ground truth. To satisfy the recommended performance specification, this criterion must be met individually for peak linear acceleration, peak rotational acceleration, and peak rotational velocity measurements.

On-field testing is required to ensure that the number of head acceleration events (HAEs) recorded during rugby activity are within an acceptable range, and do not contain an unacceptable number of false positive HAEs, or an unacceptable number of HAEs during contact events are missed (i.e., false negatives).

It is a requirement that iMGs worn in competitions where the Head Injury Assessment (HIA) is used have the functionality to provide data in “real-time”. In this instance, “real-time” refers to half-time and end-of-match access to the data on the pitch-side device portal.

The Prevent Biometrics iMG was tested for fit, comfort, and function during training sessions, and players rated their experience using detailed questionnaires. Additionally, sports practitioners evaluated the ease of preparing and managing the iMG systems through a usability study, which included setup, data extraction, and system feedback. Both players and practitioners found the iMG to be user-friendly, indicating it is practical for real-world sports applications.