27-05-2025
Greensboro woman helps prevent ACL injuries in female athletes
GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — A kinesiology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has invented a device to help women who play sports know if they're at greater risk for an ACL injury and ultimately prevent it.
Dr. Sandra Shultz is the director of UNC Greensboro's Center for Women's Health and Wellness. She also serves as co-director of the Applied Neuromechanics Research Laboratory.
She has spent much of her career exploring ways to prevent ACL injuries among female athletes.
'Before I became a faculty member, I was a clinician for 12 years. I'm a certified athletic trainer and I worked at UCLA as the associate director of athletic training and rehabilitation, and I treated a lot of ACL injuries. In fact, in one year, we had eight female athletes with an ACL injury, and it was almost epidemic, Shultz said.
She says knee laxity has been one of the most consistently identified risk factors for ACL injury.
In basic terms, too much laxity makes it harder to keep the knee stable during certain athletic movements.
Shultz wanted to know what exactly was putting women at a greater risk.
'My research really over the last 25 years has focused on understanding why females have greater laxity than males and what implications that has for injury, specifically ACL injury,' she said.
'I really started looking at hormones and that effect because we know what's different in men and women… and really looked at how that affected laxity and saw that impact that hormones do impact laxity across the menstrual cycle.'
Focusing on prevention, Shultz and her colleague Dr. Randy Schmitz, an equal co-inventor, created the GMetric3D Knee Joint Laxity Testing Apparatus.
'We wanted to develop this device that would allow us to screen for those who have greater than average laxity with the goal of identifying those who might be at risk and developing prevention strategies to mitigate that risk before injury occurs,' she said.
They've spent more than five years making adjustments to improve the device.
'We would place them in the device and a key feature of it is really stabilizing the thigh so that it doesn't move, so that we're just manipulating the lower leg so we get a good accurate
measure of joint displacement and then the machine or the device will actually move the knee in three planes of motion,' Shultz said.
Shultz explained that other laxity devices did not work in this way.
'Most laxity devices in the past only measured… if you were to measure the movement of the lower leg on the upper leg or tibia on the femur, that's measuring anterior knee laxity or the movement of the tibia forward. This device also measures side to side and rotational laxity,' she said.
The GMetric3D could have huge benefits especially because Shultz says there really isn't anything like this available in the United States.
However, that could change in the near future.
The team, including James Coppock and Sam Seyedin, just received a patent from the US government – a major step toward the goal of commercialization and getting it to clinicians.
'I've always enjoyed creating, and so to take something like this and move it forward and then to receive this recognition that other people see value in it is rewarding and very exciting for us,' Shultz.
Shultz appreciates the support from Innovate UNCG in the process of applying for the patent.
She says the next step is to secure grant funding to work with an industry partner to take the prototype to the next level for commercialization.
Shultz says the patent is significant because potential industry partners are generally more willing to invest when the intellectual property is protected.
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