Need to know if it’s safe for a student athlete to return to the game after suffering a blow to the head? There’s an app for that.
The next tool in the campaign against concussions might be your smart phone: A doctor at the University of North Carolina has teamed with other head-trauma researchers to develop an application for mobile devices that helps determine whether someone might have suffered a concussion.
Jason Mihalik of UNC’s brain injury research center joined Justin Smith of Psychological Assessment Resources Inc. and the Children’s National Medical Center in developing the program.
Smith says it’s the first observer-based concussion app. After the user answers a series of questions, the app determines the likelihood of a concussion and can eMail information to a doctor. Mihalik said June 2 that the basis for the app’s question flow comes from materials provided by the Centers for Disease Control.
The “Concussion Recognition & Response” app is available for $3.99 from Apple’s App Store under the category “Health & Fitness.”
Besides providing a checklist of possible symptoms to help determine whether to remove a student athlete from the game and seek further medical help, the app includes a feature that allows a parent, coach, or trainer to record an athlete’s symptoms through periodic evaluations, then eMail this information to a health care provider for an update on recovery.
It also features a “Return-to-Play” guide that helps determine when it’s safe for a student athlete to return to action following a concussion.
The introduction of the app is just one way to speed the response to possible concussions.
One of the key issues discussed during a daylong seminar from the National Sports Concussion Cooperative was how to most effectively bridge the communication gap between team doctors and the team athletic trainers, who often are the first to act when players suffer concussion-like symptoms.
“The documentation [of immediate symptoms] is very important, from, ‘How did they get hurt?’ to the mechanism of injury through those initial signs and symptoms, to ‘How did they progress over time?’” said Bill Griffin of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association. “It’s not only what happens at the time of the injury, but how things change.”
The cooperative consists of coaches, doctors, equipment manufacturers, and parents. The group was formed in March to study concussions and brain trauma injuries in an attempt to make sports safer.
“We’re trying to do more. We think there is an opportunity to do more,” said Art Chou, Rawlings’ vice president of research and development. “The caution that we have as manufacturers is, are we ready to draw definitive conclusions? … There’s a balance there, and I think it’s up to the research community to determine whether it is ready for prime time or not, because the issue is going to be one of public perception.”
Chou continued: “The issue is, have we confused the public? … I would like to see more consensus from the research community that supports that, because we need more data. We need to move the needle. … The last thing we need, I think now, as a whole football community, is going back and forth and confusing the issue any more.”
Mike Oliver, the executive director of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSEA), continued to express a longstanding desire to come up with a safety standard for youth helmets.
But he cautioned that it’s dangerous to rush to a conclusion before the scientific research is complete. NOCSEA, a nonprofit corporation, formed in 1969 in response to a need for a performance test standard for helmets.
“You want to have an answer. You want to have a solution to the problem,” Oliver said. “You want to be able to say … ‘We do have a solution to the problem and you can have a level of confidence [that] you will have a level of protection. … But we can’t do that until we have the science behind it.”
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