Sports-related injuries present challenges across training, acute care, and rehabilitation, and largely rely on episodic, subjective, and delayed assessment methods. Wearable sensor technologies have emerged as powerful tools for objective monitoring of biomechanical and physiological parameters, offering new opportunities to enhance the entire sports injury management continuum. While prior research has explored the function for sports monitoring and injury prevention, the potential role of wearable sensors in the entire clinical pathway covering acute injury assessment, emergency clinical decision-making and rehabilitation guidance remains insufficiently integrated. This review synthesizes current advances in wearable sensor technologies, including inertial measurement units, pressure sensors, surface electromyography, cardiovascular monitoring, biochemical sweat sensing, and emerging self-powered and textile-integrated systems. Another main part of this review is the proposal of a wearable sensor–driven emergency clinical decision framework that integrates multimodal sensor data with clinically interpretable indicators to support risk assessment, early triage, treatment suggestions, and rehabilitation management. We also analyze the key challenges related to data integration and interpretation barriers, clinical implementation, ethical, privacy, and regulatory considerations. In the end, we look forward to the future of wearable sensors in data-driven, timely, and personalized sports injury care at the intersection of sports and emergency medicine.
Xu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.