“If just 10 percent of mothers decide that football is too dangerous for their sons to play, that is it—it is the end of football.” That ominous warning from the sports biopic thriller “Concussion” expresses a growing concern as the world learns more about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition brought on by multiple, successive concussions and sub-concussive hits to the head. It was considered a factor in the suicides of former NFL stars Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, among others.
Concussion is a functional injury to the brain that, at least for now, cannot be detected by an MRI or other imaging tests. Currently the best means of diagnosing it is the Balance Error Scoring System (BESS) test, developed at the University of North Carolina. It requires that the athlete or subject stand in three poses for 20 seconds each, hands on hips with eyes closed and shoes off, first on a firm surface and then on a 2.5-inch-thick foam pad. An observer notes any “errors”—eyes opening, hands off hips, sway of 30 degrees or more, etc. There must be a baseline test before injury to compare with post-injury results. If the total error count increases by nine or more, concussion is probable. Trouble is, subjective “error” measurement is in the eye of the beholder, and if the beholder is a coach hoping the star QB can get back out there and clinch the division championship, that ninth error might go “unnoticed.”
“Let’s make a portable force plate using the four mass sensors that every new car has on its front seats.”
When the UNC team originally developed its scoring system, it conducted numerous balance tests in a climate-controlled chamber on a $50,000 balance plate capable of measuring the subject’s motion in minute detail. This data provided objective guidance for determining what constitutes a subjective error on the BESS test, but obviously such plates can’t easily be collocated at football or soccer fields. Former Ford legal counsel Walter J. Borda’s knee doctor just happened to be chatting with him about this balance plate and its potential usefulness in concussion detection when an idea struck Borda: “Let’s make a portable force plate using the four cheap mass sensors that every new car has on its front seats to weigh occupants for the airbag system.”
Borda then rang up some engineering pals you may have heard of—among them Motor Trend Car of the Year guest judge and “father of the Ford GT” Chris Theodore, former Corvette chief engineer Tom Wallace, and former Ford safety technical fellow Priya Prasad. Three years later, Safety in Motion Inc. has a raft of patents pending and is readying beta test units to commence data acquisition. The device uses two 20-by-30-by-1-inch rigid aluminum honeycomb plates connected by four automotive-grade mass sensors in the corners. Their signals flow through a circuit board and a signal processor out to a laptop running SiM’s proprietary software, which prompts for each stance and then generates an objective BESS score. It weighs just 35 pounds and can accurately measure athletes weighing between 80 and 400 pounds even when it’s resting on soft ground, at temperatures between -40 and 140 degrees F.
SiM is targeting a sub-$5,000 price, an accessible sum for school districts or booster-club fundraisers. It certainly seems a small price to pay to detect an initial concussion and possibly prevent a second one from occurring before the first has healed. And it was born in Detroit, of rustbelt auto-industry know-how. If your grandkids go out for football a decade or two from now, be sure they know to thank the Detroit car business for saving this all-American sport.
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