Soft tissue injuries have made a significant impact on almost every contact sport played and age group in the United States. Limiting linear acceleration, rotational acceleration, and momentum transfer is critical to reducing injury and trauma during these low to medium velocity (1 m/s to 12 m/s) impacts. In order to design the next generation of impact mitigating materials, accurate data non-linear materials is required. This data includes viscoelasticity, molecular architecture, rate and temperature sensitivity, mesoscale architecture. This project couples full-field measurements using optical or ultrasound techniques to measure the deformation of materials in real time. This information is leveraged to explore materials-by-design concepts (inverse analysis, FEA Updating, Machine Learning) to discover novel impact mitigating materials.