Live Injury Risk Calculator

It’s been a while since I created this website, but I’ve been hard at work in my Ph.D. cave.

A fairly substantial piece I’ve been working on is one of the chapters from the Ph.D. It’s a study looking at different ways to analyse injury data from Rugby Union injury surveillance - taking a more player-specific approach to analysing and reporting injury rates. Part of this analysis incorporated the well known Poisson distribution used in risk statistics.

Though Rugby Union epidemiology typically uses the injury incidence (injuries per 1000 exposure hours) to represent injury rates, a study by Parekh and colleagues (2011) sparked the idea of a probability based analysis of the injury risk. In this circumstance, the Poisson model considers a players injury incidence (using the number of injuries they have incurred and the number of exposure hours they have accumulated) to calculate the percentage probability of a given number of injuries in a given number of exposure hours.

So, it looks like this…

\[P(k)=\frac{(λt)^k e^{-λt}}{k!}\] where λ = injury incidence divided by 1000, t = the number of match exposure hours, e = the base of the natural logarithm and k! = factorial of ‘k’.

The application of this analysis within my chapter worked out pretty well and provided some interesting findings across a large cohort of players - it’s currently under review for publication 🤞🏼

And so came the fun bit - creating a shiny app!

The app enables medical professional/anyone who’s interested to make a quick assessment of the risk of a player sustaining only one, or more than one injury.

Have a play!

Hopefully the study will be published soon, and someone other than me will find this interesting 😅