Perhaps seeing a ‘job to be done’ in diagnosing sports concussions in rural areas where direct medical help can be distant, the Cleveland Clinic is now extending the usage of its Concussion Assessment System (C3) to assessing student athletes after suspect head blows. The two-year-old iPad app can be strapped on to the back of the athlete to measure movements that indicate balance problems, and assesses cognitive and motor impairment; information processing ability; attention/memory; balance and visual acuity. (more…)
Quantifying concussion and sub-concussion
A short and graphical article on the impact of concussions in contact sports. The HealthWorks Collective article unfortunately only focuses on concussion when there’s mounting evidence that cumulative sub-concussive blows at 15-20Gs are just as harmful as concussions at 100Gs [TTA 5 June] and a cause of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). Hard hits in US football can go up to a stunning 150Gs.The main article is from Popular Mechanics which also describes how equipment, including shoulder pads, are being designed to distribute and detect impact. What’s also surprising is how many Gs normal activities such as hopping off a (high?) step (8.1G) and sneezing (2.9G) can be.
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/football-tackle-bar-msc.jpg” thumb_width=”400″ /]Concussion monitoring in test in NY high school (US)
Following our coverage of CTE and mTBI (mild traumatic brain injury) at the GCRI presentation last week, a small-town football team is one of the first to pilot, albeit for three days, a new concussion detection technology developed by i1Biometrics. The Middletown, NY high school tested their Impact Sensing Mouth Guard that measures hits to better assess the likelihood of cumulative blows and outright head injuries. The mouth guards recognize cheek tissue for activation, and function as a standard mouth guard plus accelerometer and gyroscope to detect the hard-to-determine rotational acceleration. Data is then transmitted wirelessly to a monitoring station (laptop) where trainers can analyze the data. The i1Biometrics system will be further tested this fall at Purdue and the University of South Carolina. Article (Times Herald Record); i1 Biometrics website.
Contact sports, long term effects and CTE
The effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are likely far more widespread than the National Football League (NFL) and thousands of combat soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. That evidence was presented this past Monday at the German Center for Research and Innovation (GCRI) by two leading researchers in the field: Robert A. Stern, MD of Boston University and Inga Koerte, MD of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). The panel was moderated by Alan Schwarz of The New York Times, a freelance sportswriter/baseball stats expert-turned-concussion investigator/writer whose articles on sports concussions and long term effects are helping to change US sports safety. Update 10 June: video (1:38:00), event summary. (more…)
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