About This Project

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

This project came about after seeing a relentless stream of news stories about reported/unreported traumatic brain injuries in professional football players. The main problem I noticed was that when a player had a large head impact and it went unnoticed, they would often get another, compounding the injury to their brain.

I thought that this kind of problem can't just be in the professional leagues, so I looked further into the details of these kinds of injuries for college and high school sports. I found that the rates of injury in these adults/young adults are measured in the thousands every year. Knowing that there are even more unreported cases than reported ones, I decided something needed to be done.

Head injury detection equipment currently is far too expensive to be widely implemented across the country. Schools are already having funding issues without having to buy even more equipment for their sports teams. This means the burden falls on parents, who often times have enough trouble buying the existing equipment for their child.

I believe that if there was a low cost, easy to use alternative that fit into multiple kinds of helmets it would be widely used across all ages and sports, thus lowering the rate of compounding traumatic brain injuries and the long lasting psychological problems they create.

This project is a first step towards that lofty goal; focusing on testing existing flexible sensor technology in arrays that can fit into multiple helmets and under varying impact conditions. Hopefully, once this project is completed, a solution can start to be designed.

What is the significance of this project?

This project could lead to an open source design of an impact sensor array that parents could purchase or build for themselves at a much lower cost than the current options in the market.

As a result, there would be a much greater awareness of traumatic brain injury occurrences across multiple sports and age brackets.

What are the goals of the project?

I will test a small variety of flexible force sensors under different impact conditions specific to certain sports. I will design and test these sensor arrays so that they are interchangeable for multiple helmets.

The final result of this research will be a publication detailing:

1. sensor selection
2. a proposed sensor array design
3. all of the test results
4. a conclusion on the most promising array.