Palmos

Improving brain safety and performance tracking in contact sports.

In the intense world of contact sports, players often receive severe head impacts. Such an impact to the head can lead to serious consequences. Often athletes do not even realize that they have sustained serious damage to their head or brain and continue playing. If in any case a first impact did not yet cause a serious injury, the second impact will. This is because the first impact causes the brain to swell, leaving less protective and absorptive area around the brain. This makes the second impact much more severe. This is also known as "Second Impact Syndrome". Additionally, a doctor does not have an accurate description of when, how many and how severe head impacts were. This lack of data makes it hard to correctly diagnose or recognize an injury in time. Finally, many contact sports prohibit athletes from wearing external wearables while playing a sport making performance tracking a challenge.

We want to change this by making an instrumented mouthguard equipped with sensors that transmits information about impacts received to the head in real time. Using this information, which is shown in a mobile application, the athlete, their coach(es) and if applicable, their parent(s) can decide whether it is a good idea to take a rest or go to a doctor. This data can also be shared with medical professionals to assist them with diagnosing a potential injury and choosing a suitable treatment for it. As the mouthguard is not an external wearable it also allows performance tracking by having additional features such as measuring heart rate.