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Sarah Clark: My older son was playing freshman football and he called me and said, mom, could
you come and pick me up early, I am done. He said, well, I got hurt and so they said
I should go home that they think I had a concussion. So we went home and that’s what I knew.
What I didn’t know was that the injury is like a bruise or injury to the brain. So I
made him start doing his math homework thinking, you are not that hurt, you seem to be okay.
That makes me really appreciate the opportunity to work with the U of M folks. So now we have
just a much better process on how to identify and deal with these things so that there aren’t
other parents who have to go through the feeling of just tremendous embarrassment for not even
being close to handling it the right way.
Steven Broglio: So we are conducting a study at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor with the
football team where we place sensors in the helmet that allows us to track the location
and magnitude of every impact that occurs on the field. Information we are hoping to
find out, kind of the location and magnitude of impact that takes the cause of concussion
so we can ultimately try to predict these injuries or prevent them through better equipment.
It is a sensor that we use; we place inside the football helmet. Each one of these red
circles represents a single-axis accelerometer that allows us to measure the change of velocity
that the athlete will take. It fits inside of a typical football helmet; we don’t have
to change the padding of the football helmet at all. This data is from a high school football
game. This is our quarterback, each arrow that you see around the red head form is an
impact that he sustained during the game. So what we see here at the top are a very
low magnitude impacts, which this one here right on the forehead is a more substantial
impact that he sustained.
John Young: We really want to educate not only our coaches and our parents but our kids
as to what symptoms of concussions are so that they don’t just keep it to themselves,
particularly the boys; they want to keep it all to themselves because they don’t want
to come out of the game, but we already chatted about doing the study again next year and
how we can make some improvements and get better information and work more easily with
him and provide him a better opportunity to monitor our kids.