Overview / Usage

Today, youth football coaching staffs fail to recognize player head injuries until major symptoms can easily be noticed, while most other concussions remain undiagnosed. This inability to detect multiple brain injuries can then cause later-life cognitive abnormality for young athletes. Therefore, this project focuses on a low-cost system that can assist coaching staffs in detecting high-magnitude head impacts with high probabilities of a brain injury.

The Edison Head Impact System (eHIS) consists of a Sensor Hub (Intel Edison Compute Module, SparkFun 9 Degrees of Freedom IMU, and lithium battery) connected to a Base Station (Device with Wi-Fi). Through a Python program, the Sensor Hub measures player head acceleration and analyzes the gathered data based on pre-determined concussive thresholds. Then, if the data exceeds the threshold(s), the program can alert the coaching staff, while still being embedded in the player's helmet. Finally, the Sensor Hub can wirelessly transfer the statistics of low and high magnitude impacts onto a GUI web server running on the Base Station that tracks the players' impact statistics during a game.