The long-term effects of head trauma and multiple concussions in the National Football League continues to be a heated and controversial subject.
Having already spawned the book League of Denial and PBS documentary by the same name, the subject is about to take on an entirely different life next month, when Will Smith stars in the movie Concussion. The film has the box-office superstar portraying Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic neuropathologist, who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) while conducting an autopsy on ex-Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who died at the age of 50 in 2002.
Well, in the latest episode of its recently-launched digital video series, NFL Next, the league takes a look at how technology can develop methods that enhance and help to further protect the health and safety of players.
No suggested advance stands out more than Quanterix's vision of finger-pricking and drawing blood from players — right on the sideline — who are believed to have suffered a concussion. In real-time, the high-definition diagnostics company can gauge the blood's protein levels, which it says can be used to identify whether a concussion has been suffered or not.
Ryan Travis, an NFL senior producer and director who worked on the NFL Next series, expounded to Tech Times about the company's approach and how it could revolutionize concussion testing in the league.
"Quanterix' new way to diagnose concussions and other disease can affect football," Travis says. "You can take a little sample of blood on the sideline and within 20 minutes they'd be able to tell if you if you had some kind of impact and take you off the field."
The last part of Travis's point is especially significant, considering players often do whatever they could to not give away that they have indeed suffered a concussion, so that they could stay in the game.
"Ultimately the objective here is to develop tests that have 100 percent diagnostic accuracy, which means you have 100 percent sensitivity as well as 100 percent specificity," David Wilson, PhD. and vice president of product development at Quanterix, says in the NFL Next Health and Safety episode, which debuted on the site Wednesday.
Given the tech advances that the NFL has already made in virtual reality and biometrics, as far as player tracking goes, this proposed finger-prick concussion testing could prove to be the most important of them all if it comes to fruition. After all, players' health and safety should come first at all times.
The same episode about player Health and Safety, has NFL Next sitting down with Riddell and Catapult, as the companies spoke about working toward tech advances aimed at reducing player injury and increasing the sustainability of football helmets.
"It's been amazing to see how much technology has its place in football from the way it's captured to the way it's consumed and how it's used to make the game safer," Joey Maloney, an NFL director of photography and producer who also worked on NFL Next, told Tech Times. "The NFL provides grants to companies to help advance player safety technology and we're at the point now where we could make it safer and help with those issues and problems."
