Radar Shows Promise for Detecting Concussion

By asking an individual to walk a short distance in front of a radar system while saying the months of the year in reverse order, researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute can determine if that person is impaired and possibly suffering from a concussion. This simple test, which could be performed on the sideline of a sporting event or on a battlefield, has the potential to help coaches and commanders decide if athletes and soldiers are ready to engage in activity again.

Transcript

00:00:00 here at GTRI we have a focus on radar in our laboratory and what we'd like to be able to do is show that this can be extended into the medical arena and it has a very real applicability to the concussion diagnosis scenario concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury and it can be caused by a variety of things usually a blow to the head for example in sports football players who have been

00:00:27 concussed uh multiple times and these repeated concussions are really something that you want to avoid we have a radar setup here that we are able to have an individual walk towards and away from the radar and then be able to pull in the data from that and be able to look at them with our signal processing and image processing techniques what we're trying to accomplish is to

00:00:52 quantify the differences between a normal person's walking gate and someone who has had impairment due to a concussive event we were able to find research that related concussion impairment back to the impairment somebody exhibits with a certain level of blood alcohol content and with that we were able to purchase blood alcohol content goggles which impair your vision

00:01:17 we have the individuals wear these goggles and walk for our analysis so that they have the impairment as if they had a concussion the person walks normally towards and away and then the person walks normally while saying the months of the year in reverse order once that's completed they put on the impairment goggles and walk as normally as possible with those and then after

00:01:39 that they complete the same task but also saying the months of the year in reverse order we found that if you combine the ability to look at someone's motor skills with their cognitive skills that you get a better indication as to whether they've suffered a mild concussion what we're looking to do is to make this a little bit easier of a diagnosis to make by removing the need

00:02:02 for special clothing or reflective markers like you would uh typically see in a lot of gate analysis centers one place that it could be used on the military side would be if you have a commander who needs to decide whether somebody who's been near a blast sustained a concussion and by using this he can get kind of a stoplight indication yes they should be able to go

00:02:24 back no or it's kind of uh up in the air and they need to seek another opinion on the matter i think the big picture that we're trying to give to others is that there is a way to be unobtrusive to an individual that way we can help prevent future successive concussions from happening too closely to one another and and hopefully stop other neurological problems that come along with having

00:02:52 these multiple concussions because you are not fully recovered from your original