Tracking Athletic Concussions with GPS
11 Oct 2012It’s fall, and that means its time for some football. It also means the potential for many of our athletes suffering concussions, whether during amateur play or professional sports. But thanks to Dr. Brian Ragan of Ohio University (OU), GPS tracking technology is helping researchers discover what happens to people after getting a concussion, with the goal of more accurately measuring recovery.
Every year approximately 300,000 concussions are reported as a result of sports or recreational activities, according to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). However, the number is likely to be significantly higher since not everyone who gets a concussion will see a doctor, the ACSM suspects. Between 2001 and 2005, 502,000 children and teens arrived in emergency rooms throughout the US for concussions, 50% of which were sports-related.
It’s no surprise then that Dr. Ragan and his research team at Ohio University want to find out more about what happens to people after they receive a concussion, including where they go and how active they are; GPS technology is going to help them find this out. Specifically, GPS systems are being used as an objective measuring device to track post-concussion patients activities: where they go, how active they are, what they’re doing, and when they are active.
“We want to evaluate each item like you would if you were administering an educational test or a licensing exam,” says Dr. Brian Regan.
Not only does Dr. Ragan have a professional interest in the study as the assistant professor of athletic training at Ohio University, but he also has a personal interest in it. Several years before, the son of Ragan’s OU doctoral dissertation advisor, received a concussion during a football game. This has increased his interest in both the short-term and long-term effects of concussions that occur as a result of head blows suffered in sports injuries.
Concussions are caused by a trauma to the head, whether by a bump, jolt, or blow. They are classified as a traumatic brain injury because it can change the way the brain functions, if only for a short period of time. Symptoms of a concussion include confusion, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, and disorientation. These symptoms can progress into personality and behavioral changes, loss of judgment, and other signs known as “post-concussive syndrome.”
Dr. Ragan is now using a combination of statistical analysis for measuring how effective current medical tests are and GPS technology for post-concussion statistics. His goal is to not only find out the exact effects of concussions in the short term, but over a longer period in a person’s life.
“We are just beginning to try to quantify concussions and while the functional measures are evolving, when you talk about long-term consequences, that’s what is still being ignored,” Ragan said. Ragan is using a geospatial faculty fellowship awarded to him recently for a new multi-pronged approach for examining the effectiveness of current medical tests for athletic head injuries and their impact on what athletes do after receiving a concussion.
Regan’s team consists of six undergraduate students, 12 graduate students, and one doctoral student at Ohio University. Their concussion research studies male and female athletes at the university along with sports participants at local colleges including the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Marietta College. Ragan and his research team will use the data collected with the help of GPS tracking to more accurately determine the effectiveness of the recovery period.
Ragan has spent eight years dedicating his research to concussions and intends to continue in these efforts, with the help of modern GPS tracking technology.
Comments are closed.