One of the most common foot-ball related injuries? Concussion. And this, in turn, can lead to longer-term damage to the brain. (The New York Times has run several excellent articles on the topic.)
A concussion is not the same thing as a bruise on the brain. There's usually no swelling or bleeding. A concussion occurs when the head accelerates too rapidly, and/or decelerates too suddenly, or is twisted or spun in some way. Symptoms include confusion, blurred vision, memory, loss and nausea — sometimes unconsciousness, but not always.
Sure, professional players are required to don safety gear, including protective helmets, but according to this article in Technology Review, a helmet can't completely prevent concussions. Fortunately, this an issue that the NFL, among other organizations, is taking very seriously, with a new sideline concussion test for its players.
If we better understood how and why concussions occurred, perhaps we could design better helmets and protect the players. So over the last few years, researchers at Virginia Tech have been working with sensor-equipped helmets developed by a company called Simbex to better understand all the forces acting on the head during a real-time football game that could lead to concussion, or worse.
It's called a Head Impact Telemetry System (HITS), and is basically a professional football helmet outfitted with accelerometers and a radio transmitter capable of ranging the length of a football field. If the helmet takes a hard hit, the sensors detect it, measure it, and transmit that data wirelessly to laptop computer on the sidelines.
That data can alert coaches, for instance, when their players take a particularly hard hit, so they know to watch for signs of concussion (it is not always immediately apparent). And the stored data can later be synchronized with a central database to learn more about these kinds of injuries.
For instance, depending on what position you play, you'll experience different kinds of hits. If you're a lineman, you get a lot of lower-impact frontal blows, while wide receivers might get hit less frequently, but those blows are far more intense. And apparently linebackers take hits with higher accelerations than linemen. It might be that one day, we'll see position-specific helmet designs, based on the kinds of hits different players are most likely to endure. Read the full report here.
Source: by Jennifer Ouellette, Scientific American.
