The NFL has been deploying its new impact-monitoring mouth guards and cleat-tracking technology during training camps and preseason games. Both are pilot programs being done in conjunction with the NFLPA to see if injury prevention insights can be gleaned from the data.
As part of its $60 million Engineering Roadmap to promote health and safety initiatives, the league’s engineers developed a new sensor technology to gauge head impacts by severity and location, among other metrics. SportTechie was the first to report on its development and testing last year, when the first trial was being conducted with the University of Virginia football team. This year, players on four NFL teams are wearing the sensor-laden mouth guard.
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“The goal of it is to validate the program to make sure that the sensors work, that they’re transmitting the data appropriately, that we’re collecting the data, that we can make sense of the data, that player acceptance is real,” says Jeff Miller, the NFL’s EVP of health and safety. “That’s a lot of variables that we’re looking at now. It’s a pilot program in the truest sense of the word.”
Prior NFL research examining the forces and causes of concussions identified helmet-to-helmet contact as a prime culprit, leading to last year’s implementation of the so-called “Helmet Rule.” Though controversial at the time, the enforcement of that rule is a likely contributor to a 29% reduction in reported concussions in the 2018 NFL season compared to the previous year. “The results speak for themselves,” NFL COO Maryann Turcke says. “We had a lot fewer concussions, a lot more quarterbacks standing up. The game was made better last year, and we’re pretty happy with that.” (Reducing concussions does not remove the risk from football. Players at all levels can still be exposed to head trauma from the cumulative impact of lesser hits that do not cause concussions.)
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The work has been spearheaded by the leaders of the University of Virginia’s Center for Applied Biomechanics—director Jeff Crandall and deputy Richard Kent—through their Biocore consulting lab in Charlottesville and done in collaboration with NFLPA-affiliated consultants such as Kristy Arbogast, the director of engineering for the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. One goal of these efforts is to inform the development of position-specific helmets.
“The insights that we’re getting from fusing those two data sets—injury and engineering data—are now leading and informing rules changes, which is one of the most important things for us,” says Jennifer Langton, the NFL’s VP for health and safety initiatives. “The outcome of that was a reduction in injury.”
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Further concussion prevention remains a top priority given the long-term ramifications of brain trauma in football, but the NFL is also embarking on an endeavor to better understand the mechanics of leg injuries. Tears, breaks and other ailments affecting lower extremities account for the most time lost for players.
The league is inserting RFID tags in the cleats of players from eight teams to understand the footwear and cleat patterns being worn on different surfaces and how those might correlate with injury rates. (Equipment managers of the other 24 teams have been asked to manually log footwear selections; the plan is to expand the RFID program to all 32 teams in 2020.) There is also research underway to assess the properties of field surfaces—natural grass and the 12 different recipes of artificial turf surfaces in use across the NFL.
“Understanding the physics there and how that all works is going to be important to that next phase of health and safety improvements,” Turcke says.
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