Real-time assessment of repetitive head impacts (RHI) in youth and collegiate sports

There is a growing body of evidence that head injuries within youth sports is a major problem, affecting 2.5 million youths each year. Repetitive impacts may lead to degenerative structural changes in the brain and altered brain function. Significant effort has been placed in understanding this effect in helmeted sports, however, there are currently very few viable solutions for observing and understanding subconcussive events in non-helmeted youth sports.

This project seeks to understand how repetitive impacts cause regional brain tissue injury and cognitive disfunction. The multi-disciplinary team of experts will accomplish this by developing next generation wearable motion sensors to better detect head impacts. Youth soccer players will wear these motion sensors throughout the season, and the collected information will be coupled with brain imaging and sophisticated computer modeling.

Leveraging the recently established Center for Traumatic Brain Injury this project will draw upon the cross-departmental expertise of each PI to develop the first fully quantitative and comprehensive multi-modal surveillance system approach for detecting potentially injurious, asymptomatic head impacts in youth and collegiate athletes.

The knowledge gained in this project will help improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of sports-related head injury.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Christian Franck, professor of mechanical Engineering

CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Alison Brooks, professor of orthopedics

Peter Ferrazzano, professor of pediatrics

Traci Snedden, clinical associate professor of nursing

CO-INVESTIGATOR

Andrew Alexander, professor of medical physics

Joseph Andrews, assistant professor of mechanical engineering

Alanna Kessler-Jones, associate professor of neurology