If you watched the Super Bowl LII earlier this month, you'll recall a moment in the second quarter when Patriots quarterback Tom Brady found Brandin Cooks wide open for a beautiful, 23-yard completion. But when Cooks turned to run for the end zone, he didn’t see Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins gunning for him on the left. Like Jaws, Jenkins roared out of the murky deep, and leveled Cooks with a vicious hit to the head.

In close-ups, you can see Cooks’ head bobble on his shoulders before he crumples to the ground. He briefly loses consciousness, and after he's walked off the field, he doesn't return for the rest of the game. That's because of the NFL's concussion safety protocol—a process that mostly involves checking for vague symptoms like "a blank look", and which is currently undergoing extensive revision for its failure to protect players from serious injury.

It's no secret that the NFL has a concussion problem. Countless players have demonstrated the long-term effects of repetitive head injury, which are so gruesome that the likes of Barack Obama and Justin Timberlake have said they would never let their kids play football.

In 2016, the League pledged $60 million toward developing better player safety equipment for players. One company, Prevent Biometrics, believes they can help the NFL achieve that goal by providing better data. With their new mouthguard-mounted head impact monitoring system, Prevent Biometrics hopes to help researchers collect as much data about head impacts as possible. And with that data, they hope to change how athletes and coaches deal with concussions for the better.

Cool Runnings

The quest to accurately monitor head impacts dates back to the 1950s, beginning with the research of Dr. John Paul Stapp. An Air Force flight surgeon, Stapp used himself as a test subject to study the effects on acceleration and deceleration on the human body. He's been called a "human crash dummy" for his contribution to understanding how the skull responds to impact—and how to make planes and cars safer in the event of a crash.

In sports, those impacts have normally been measured with helmet-mounted sensors. The Riddell Sideline Response System (SRS), a helmet-mounted head impact monitoring system, have been available for sale since 2004. But data collected from those sensors is flawed, because helmets move differently than human heads do. That's part of the reason the NFL announced in 2015 that it was indefinitely postponing the use of concussion-monitoring systems until a more accurate method could be found.

Now, it looks like there is one: a mouthguard. Athletes who play sports sans-helmet, like boxers or wrestlers, often wear mouthguards. And more importantly, the data those mouthguards collect is far more accurate than a helmet sensor, since the mouthguard is directly coupled to the skull through the teeth.

Prevent Biometrics

Dr. Adam Bartsch had been thinking about a sensor-mounted mouthguard for over a decade before he became the chief science officer at Prevent Biometrics. I first met Bartsch at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, where he was casually swinging a sledgehammer into a child-sized crash test dummy’s head.

Bartsch was just a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Ohio State when he first heard of the idea of monitoring head impact through a mouthguard.

“In 2003 I attended a talk given by Dr. Stefan Duma from Virginia Tech on the first sensor data obtained from a helmet-mounted system in football,” Bartsch says. “Dr. John Melvin, who was the preeminent safety engineer in the audience, asked a question about mounting the sensors in a mouthpiece to get better coupling. I remember thinking, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’”