Channing Ward causes a fumble during a game last year. Photo by: Logan Kirkland
Athletics is a major form of entertainment in the United States – especially here in Oxford. Through the cheering and excitement, there is one factor that spectators seem to forget about when their favorite team or athlete is on the field: health and safety.
An estimated 300,000 sport-related traumatic brain injuries, predominantly concussions, occur annually in the United States. Sports are second only to motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of traumatic brain injury among people aged 15 to 24 years, according to the Journal of Athletic Training.
Through X2 Biosystems-a company out of Seattle that researches concussions and concussion hardware-and C spire, the University of Mississippi is able to utilize the X patch and the software X2 ICE. The software is currently being used in organizations like the NFL.
Matthew Morrison, an assistant professor in the electrical engineering department, initiated this technology in the football program after moving to Mississippi from the University of South Florida and seeing a real passion for sports in this state.
“I wanted to create opportunities and avenues towards STEM education through the love of sports,” Morrison said.”Ultimately, our goal is to give (athletes) as many tools to be safe, improve their quality of play and a prescriptive form to be able to help the athletic trainers make informed decisions on whether or not a player should be removed from play and how long it can be until they can return to play.”
To implement the software, athletic trainers ask the athletes a number of questions and base results on how quickly they can recall those questions.
“Say you have a potential concussive event and I ask you to say the months backwards and you say ‘butterfly,’” Morrison said. “We are going to log that, so that way we have some sort of comparison between what you said in your baseline and how you’re moving on from that.”
Morrison said the technology helps change concussion protocol to aide in deciding if a player can continue in a game. The next step is trying to correlate what type of hit profile an athlete is having, to how they are able to recover from a concussion and how quickly they can get back onto the filed, short term, medium term and long term.
“One of the things that we are trying to deal with is something called second impact syndrome, where you have two mild hits that happen back to back in the same game,” Morrison said. “The additive effect of those two hits creates a real problem.”
The X2 patch is placed directly behind the ear of the athlete, making sure it is coupled with the head. Morrison said this patch is effective because it has six degrees of freedom.
One of the challenges Morrison said they are facing is making the entire field accessible for the patches to sync with the wireless access points. He said a reliable access point has a range of about 50 feet, and width of the field is 160 feet.
“What we are going to be doing is eight access points around the field that use a different wireless standard, and we want to be able to relay that information and cover that entire filed,” Morrison said.”We want to be able to provide that information in real time, which isn’t being done right now. When we complete this project we are going to have the first stadium that would be able to have that capability in the world.”
Once this process is finished every venue where there is a potential concussive event they are going to make this technology available, according to Morrison.
Morrison said they want to have everything finished by the beginning of the season, but gave no guarantees.
Organizations that oversee the NFL and NBA are giving time, attention and focus on this subject. The Department of Defense is giving attention to this topic as well because head injuries are becoming a common problem in soldiers, according to Chancellor Dan Jones.
“What we need are some clear answers, and research is the pathway to do this,” Jones said. “The research that is being done here is groundbreaking, innovative and highly technical. I am very proud of our faculty for being engaged and involved in this and would be proud if the University of Mississippi was part of finding the pathway to better solutions for prevention of head injury and management of head injury in athletes and soldiers.”
Jones said part of the committee he led with other presidents and chancellors was to recommend that the SEC not only do this study as an individual effort, but also join with the NCAA and the Department of Defense.
“I was the only physician in the group, and so when the SEC needed to have some leadership in this area, even though I am not a concussion expert, I was a physician and understood research principles and so forth and was pleased and proud to offer my leadership for the conference in the area of concussions,” Jones said. “all of this is coming together for a very large national effort and I’m pleased to be a small part of it.”
Shannon Singletary, the senior associate athletics director of health and sports performance, said
there is enough information out there catching their attention. He said they are all trying to establish the best practices in treating and preventing concussions, because information and research in recent deaths and suicides of some college players and retired athletes associate with head injuries in some cases.
“There is definitely enough information to make us know or think that there is a correlation between head injuries and long term disability,” Singletary said.”This technology is not the complete answer, but it’s certainly a big piece of the puzzle, because with this technology we are now able to actually see how much force our athletes are taking at any given hit.”
Singletary said the X patch has a time stamp, which will allow coaches and trainers to match the data with practice and game films to see exactly what the athlete did wrong and what it looked like.
Over time, athletics will be able to match the data with concussion symptoms; even now, without that research, we are able to see the repetitive force, allowing them to check on players who do not report symptoms.
Singletary said one of the largest contributions to injury is poor tackling technique. By using the patch in practice, coaches can look at all of the players and see if they are hitting with the same side, receptively lowering their heads.
“We are able to actually show that athlete a 3D picture of the head, with the helmet on, and show him his picture on the computer screen exactly what’s happening when he’s making that hit,” Singletary said.
Singletary said this tackling analyzation is going to become an important factor for recruiting. He said there was one recruit who committed to Ole Miss because the father admired the wonderful example of healthcare that was provided to Laquon Treadwell through the fans and administration.
“Families are not asking, ‘Is my kid going to get the best shoes?’, or the best baseball glove,”Singletary said. “They are asking, ‘Are you going to take care of the healthcare of my son or daughter if they come to Ole Miss?’”
Singletary said one of the most important things that he wants this campus to understand is that the University of Mississippi athletics department cannot do this without its partnerships with the division of student life and the departments of engineering and applied sciences.
“It is another clear example of the University of Mississippi being the flagship of this state and being a leader across the nation,” Singletary said.
By: Logan Kirkland
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‘Heads in the Game’: Summer research program
“Heads in the Game” is a summer program for high school students starting June 28 – July 28 on the Oxford campus which brings students from Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama and Tennessee on a full scholarship.
The students will learn methods of computer science, electrical engineering, learning biomedical and neurological science at the high school level along with a research methods course.
Morrison said the students will go to athletics and interview trainers and other employers in order to see what they need to in order to develop an app. The app will include the athletes medical information, supplements, training, and nutrition as a way for them to track their health.
“Not only will it help the student athletes have better nutrition, but then we can take that data if we see an athlete as consistently recovering better from hits to the head as a opposed to a different athlete whats the difference? Maybe it’s their diet, maybe it’s some sort of medication they’re on,” Morrison said.
Morrison said he does not want just the students to succeed, he wants them to take what they have learned back to their community and help their fellow classmates
“When I first moved here a lot of people were saying things like Mississippi is last in all things that are good and first in all things that are bad”, Morrison said. “My impression is you have a lot of people here who really want to make a difference and help people.”
