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The Dalhousie Tigers are already halfway to their goal of raising $40,000 for the new gear.

Haggett says the high-tech helmets represent another tool used by coaches and trainers to keep track of each athlete’s health. He stressed that the novel technology will not replace strict protocols used on the sidelines to assess potential head injuries.

However, Haggett says it’s often difficult to see what is happening on the field when the offensive and defensive lines lock horns.

“It’s very hard, unless you had a drone going 24/7,” says Haggett, the Tigers’ coach for the past four years. “The sensors will take readings of the things we can’t see.”

The thresholds that trigger the alerts are based on a decade’s worth of compiling and analyzing data from more than one million hits and collisions on football fields across the United States, Riddell says on its website.

Judy Gargaro, a former researcher who specialized in brain injuries, says she would want to learn more about how the thresholds were determined, given that similar impacts can result in very different outcomes.

“There’s so much we don’t understand around concussions,” says Gargaro, director of the Acquired Brain Injury Program at the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation.

“What happens if they don’t have the threshold quite right, and you make a decision to leave somebody in and that turns out to be a bad decision because you’ve relied on the technology.”

Similarly, if the threshold is set too low, that could result in an overreaction, needlessly spreading fear through the team, she says.