Ilona Maher, a prominent player in the current Women’s Rugby World Cup, is wearing a specialized mouthguard designed to predict potential concussions during matches. These innovative devices light up when a player experiences an impact that could lead to a concussion, providing crucial information to medical teams and coaches. A multidisciplinary team of engineers and clinicians, including Dr. Eanna Falvey and Dr. Lindsay Starling, created these smart mouthguards. They represent a major step forward in addressing concussions across all levels of contact sports.
The mouthguards were first prototyped in 2022, with Bluetooth alerts but no capacity to light up. The current iteration seeks to remedy this limitation, allowing play to provide real-time visual feedback. Over the course of the tournament, we’ll collect more data off these mouthguards. Collecting these data may provide invaluable insight into concussions sustained by female athletes.
Understanding the Technology Behind the Mouthguards
These specialized mouthguards measure two main factors—peak linear acceleration and peak angular acceleration. This allows them to make more informed judgments about when a player could potentially be at risk for a concussion. Similarly, the alert threshold for these impacts is lower for women as compared to men. This ruling paves the way toward a better understanding of the unique physiological responses experienced by female athletes.
Dr. Eanna Falvey, one of the main developers of the mouthguard, stresses how crucial this distinction is. By using sex as a variable, teams are able to more effectively learn about women as athletes, he adds. Research has indicated that men and women actually sustain concussions at similar rates. Yet, how these injuries come about can vary greatly between men and women.
The information gathered from these mouthguards goes beyond just notifying you of when an injury occurs. This would account for things like how long and how strong of impacts are taken while playing. This all-inclusive approach provides more diverse medical personnel the opportunity to obtain a better picture of what each player is experiencing on the field.
Real-World Impact During the World Cup
On just one weekend of group play in the World Cup, there were six alert events triggering possible concussion risks to be reviewed. But despite this, it was reported that one such alert went completely unnoticed by medical staff. This major oversight brings to the forefront the need for further progress in tracking and eliminating concussion risks throughout the course of high-intensity games.
Dr. Falvey told us about a profound realization. The mouthguard could’ve identified one of the estimated 18 percent of concussions that don’t show symptoms until days after the injury occurs. After all, we can’t treat what we aren’t aware of, he continued. The earlier we understand these occurrences, the more effective our response will be.
Teams are currently busy investigating these alerts. Their goal is to identify behaviors and techniques from players that would be more likely to lead to concussion causing events. As compelling as the argument sounded, Dr. Falvey warned against being swept up in the moment. He emphasized the importance of looking at the methods of individual players to see why they’re having more events and how that can be remedied.
Looking Ahead: Future Developments and Applications
Sports, especially at the youth level, are increasingly adopting these mouthguards that are generating data that could help flip the future of concussion management. Dr. Lindsay Starling emphasizes the need for extensive data collection over time to effectively personalize concussion thresholds for individual athletes. “To individualise, you have to be able to collect and observe a tremendous amount of data about an individual person,” she says. We really need champions to keep mouthguards in players’ mouths over longer times. This will ensure that we’re able to get a concise and thorough representation of each player’s performance.
Dr. Falvey advocates that we do a better job of finding players predisposed to concussions. Taking this step would allow them to develop alert thresholds that are adapted to their unique situations. Our goal is to find people who are at an increased risk of concussion. Our hope is to provide them with a new, better, lower alert threshold.
This increased collaboration among medical teams and researchers is critical in improving player safety. Importantly, it fosters a culture of sharing data and insights among different teams and leagues. Dr. Falvey expressed this sentiment clearly: “My attitude on this is that the data is not a competitive thing; this is something we can all share and learn from each other.”
