Head impact monitor brings advanced real-time monitoring to sports

“Prevent Biometrics is focused on protecting the life-changing benefits of sports. Our new Gen 1.2 Head Impact Monitor System is designed to reduce the incidence of undetected and untreated concussions, and ultimately help sports teams improve player safety and performance".

"By turning the ineffective, observational method into an effective, data-driven method, we’ve taken the guesswork out of identifying athletes for concussion assessment,” said Steve Washburn, chief executive officer of Prevent Biometrics.

Using technology developed and tested over eight years, the new four-part Gen 1.2 Head Impact Monitor System alerts trainers and sideline personnel in real time when a player has received a potential concussion-causing impact and should be assessed for a possible concussion.

• Impact Monitor (IM) Mouthguard: At the heart of the system is the next generation of the IM Mouthguard, featuring technology that accurately measures linear and rotational acceleration, impact location and direction, and counts every impact received.
• Team App: Impacts are displayed in real time in the accompanying Team App, which provides notification when an individual impact exceeds a pre-set threshold, along with access to concussion symptom checklists, and tools that make it easier to manage players through the stages of concussion protocol.
• Web Portal: The web portal provides schools or athletic associations advanced analytics and reporting functionality, allowing them to review head impacts by impact characteristics or for any sub-set of athletes.
• Team Case: A durable team case will store up to 27 IM Mouthguards, and centrally charge and sanitise each one.

The Prevent Head Impact Monitor System has already proven valuable to leading concussion researchers, enabling them to accurately and cost-effectively measure head impacts in the lab and on the field, and to correlate the data to health outcomes.

This headimpact data advances the understanding of concussions in sports and drives improvements in player techniques, rules of play, equipment and other contributing factors.

“We’re working with the nation’s leading concussion researchers, and because the system is so accurate, cost-effective and easy to use, they can outfit larger numbers of athletes to expand the scope of their studies,” said Adam Bartsch, Ph.D., chief science officer of Prevent Biometrics.

In addition to assisting concussion researchers, Prevent Biometrics is the recipient of a $4.5 million Department of Defense grant to develop a military head-impact monitoring system and collect data from military academy athletes and combatants. Within the professional sports arena, the NFL will begin testing the Prevent system in early 2018.

Prevent’s new Gen 1.2 system will move from beta testing to being commercially available to select schools and youth associations beginning with the 2018 football season.

Pricing for the boil-and-bite IM Mouthguard will be $199 per player. Individual storage cases will cost $39 each, and the team case will be $299. The team app and web portal will be included at no charge for all users.

Initial 2018 availability will be focused in four regions: Connecticut/Massachusetts, Minnesota/Wisconsin, Texas and Colorado. Organisations or teams outside of those regions may inquire about availability. The product will also be available to researchers nationwide in both a boil-and-bite and custom IM Mouthguard version.

Discover more here.

Image credit: Prevent Biometrics