Longitudinal Monitoring of Biomechanical and Psychological State in Collegiate Female Basketball Athletes Using Principal Component Analysis

Figure 1

Use-case example of weekly changes in biomechanical principal component scores and self-reported pain in a collegiate female basketball athlete across the 2022-2023 competitive season. Specifically, on-court impact load and self-reported pain levels peaked before the detection of statistically significant alterations in on-court asymmetry. To highlight the on-court asymmetry-specific minimum detectable change (MDC), upper and lower bounds are depicted for red-flagging biomechanical fluctuations above and beyond the measurement error of the system. The MDC statistics are derived based on five-weeks of preseason training and normative biomechanical patterns exhibited at the cohort level, with this MDC value applied (±) to the average value that this subject displayed across the same timeframe to calculate individualized bounds by which their on-court asymmetry fluctuated from their normative patterns. It is important to note that this figure underrepresents the amount of data that was collected per participant over the two-year study period, as (i) only data from the 2022-2023 season are presented, as the first season (2021-2022) was only used to train the PCA model, and (ii) only weeks in which all three forms of data (i.e., on-court biomechanics, CMJ biomechanics, and psychological state) were concurrently collected are visually represented for simplicity sake and interpretability.