Open Source, Open Science: Development of OpenLESS as the Automated Landing Error Scoring System

Area of Science:

• Biomechanics
• Movement Analysis
• Sports Science

Background:

• Clinical assessments for movement quality are time-consuming.
• Automated tools are needed to improve efficiency in monitoring patient outcomes.
• The Landing Error Scoring System (LESS) requires objective and rapid scoring methods.

Purpose of the Study:

• Develop and validate the Open Landing Error Scoring System (OpenLESS), an automated tool for jump-landing analysis.
• Assess the validity of OpenLESS against expert LESS scores in healthy and clinical populations.
• Evaluate the intersession reliability of OpenLESS in athletes.

Main Methods:

• OpenLESS utilizes markerless motion capture and 3D kinematics to interpret movement quality.
• Validity was assessed by comparing OpenLESS scores to expert LESS scores in healthy and post-ACLR cohorts.
• Reliability was determined using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), SEM, and MDC in an athlete cohort.

Main Results:

• OpenLESS demonstrated good agreement with expert LESS scores in healthy (ICC2,k=0.79) and post-ACLR (ICC2,k=0.88) cohorts.
• Automated scoring significantly reduced analysis time, processing 353 trials in under 25 minutes versus 35 hours for manual scoring.
• Excellent intersession reliability (ICC2,k>0.89) was observed in field-based testing, with a SEM of 0.98 and MDC of 2.72 errors.

Conclusions:

• OpenLESS is a valid and efficient tool for automated jump-landing movement quality assessment.
• The system demonstrates good validity in healthy and post-ACLR populations.
• OpenLESS provides excellent reliability for field-based assessments, addressing the need for objective movement analysis.