Perhaps you've heard of helmet sensors to alert emergency contacts if a rider falls from a bicycle. Now, Stanford bioengineers are working with mouthguards that measure and report head impacts in football players in real time, and the research could have implications for understanding the forces of head traumas from more common accidents.
Stanford News reports:
For the past few years, David Camarillo, an assistant professor of bioengineering, and his colleagues have been supplying Stanford football players with special mouthguards equipped with accelerometers that measure the impacts players sustain during a practice or game. Previous studies have suggested a correlation between the severity of brain injuries and the biomechanics associated with skull movement from an impact.
Camarillo's group uses a sensor-laden mouthguard because it can directly measure skull accelerations – by attaching to the top row of teeth – which is difficult to achieve with sensors attached to the skin or other tissues. So far, the researchers have recorded thousands of these impacts, and have found that players' heads frequently sustain accelerations of 10 g forces, and, in rarer instances, as much as 100 g forces. By comparison, space shuttle astronauts experience a maximum of 3 g forces on launch and reentry.
Camarillo, PhD, and colleagues including bioengindeering doctoral student Lyndia Wu are enhancing the technology and refining the data collected, detecting head impacts in a lab test-dummy with 99 percent accuracy. They've recently published a paper on their work in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.
"Our football team has been extremely cooperative and interested in helping solve this problem," Camarillo told writer Bjorn Carey. "What we are learning from them will help lead to technologies that will one day make bike riding and driving in your car safer too."
Previously: Is repetitive heading in soccer a health hazard?, Now that’s using your head: Bike-helmet monitor alerts emergency contacts after a crash and Stanford researchers working to combat concussions in football
Photo by Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service
