Concussions are arguably football's most prominent injury, but they're also its most mysterious. With the help of Stanford University's football team, a group of Stanford doctors and neuroscientists is working to quantify the head trauma that players sustain during a game.
High-definition, super-slow-motion cameras are being used to track special markings on the helmets in order to provide details on the impact velocity of a blow to the head. The researchers have also developed custom mouth guards equipped with accelerometers and gyrometers that measure linear and rotational acceleration. The data from the sensors - which the scientists pull from the mouth guards after games and practices throughout the season - will provide critical baseline data of how many jarring hits players typically experience.
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Transcript
00:00:02 Stanford University. The time that at impact occurs when two football players take a blow to the head is less than tenths of a second. Here at Stanford, we're working as a multi-disciplinary team in order to understand what causes a concussion, what causes these brain injuries. By doing a study, we're really looking at, for the first time, what happens to the head and the neck when someone runs into somebody else. It's using high-speed, high-def super slow-mo cameras and watching the football players collide. We have a number of markers on the player's helmets and we can track them over time from each camera view during a collision.
00:00:50 So, you can see, as the players are approaching each other, we get an estimate of what the initial velocity is just before the moment of impact. What we're looking at is a case of math guards that they're using with the football team this year. On one side of it, we have accelerometers and gyrometers which measure linear and rotational acceleration that occurs in the head and neck. On the other side, we have a battery which powers the mouth guard. When we get the mouth guard back from the athlete, we attach it to the rear. We start pulling the information off. And as you can see, there's a tremendous amount of information that comes just off of one mouth guard. The idea is, that as our athletes wear
00:01:30 them over a season, we can get an understanding of number of blows, types of blows that they're encountering. Out in the field, we try to get as much data as we can on the motions and forces associated with head blows, and then we try to build laboratory models so that we can study this stuff in the laboratory. What we've learned so far is that the types of hit setter occurring can come from head to head impacts in football but they can come from shoulder to chest impacts which can accelerate the head. We've learned that when athletes land on the ground, the heads are also accelerated. So, these previous types of head accelerations that maybe weren't counted as hits, maybe they should be counted. Oh, no.
00:02:14 Oh, no. Football is a starting point. We're also currently testing accelerometer devices on other sports at Stanford including soccer and field hockey. If you really understand carefully what the mechanism of the concussion is, that is where the preventative part comes in, and then we can start zeroing in and prototyping technologies that may reduce the likelihood of sustaining injury in the first place. If we can solve some of these problems and answer some of the questions that are still unanswered today, we can make sports participation safer for everybody. For more, please visit us at stanford.edu.
