Lack Of Concussions In Football

From what I can remember, football has become a Sunday ritual in my family since I was a kid. Growing up in the Northeast, we lived a couple hours from Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York. Being the playing ground for the New York Jets 1964 to 1983, now the New York Jets play at MetLife Stadium, in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Living so close to the stadium and having family members like my Dad, Uncles, and Grandfather take the train or a boat over to watch Joe Namath play was an experience I wish I could have been a part of. Football has become so popular in America, that they have a day dedicated to watching your favorite team play their hardest versus one of the other thirty-one teams in the league. Sunday once

It is not new news learning that concussions are a common occurrence throughout the sport of football. It just so happens that throughout the last two decades, former NFL players have or have threatened the NFL with lawsuits regarding their personal health, specifically brain injuries. Many experts and players also question if the latest technology used to prevent concussions from occurring are effective. Modern day CT scans can rule out bleeding in the brain, they however do not diagnose concussions. This causes many concussions to go unseen due to the lack of advancements in the use of CT equipment. Of the five million people who receive CT scans for head injuries, over ninety percent of them are CT negative, which cause them to receive harmful radiation and unnecessary procedural and absorbent costs. As an alternative, BrainScope Company, which is a privately held neurotechnology company, focuses on traumatic brain injury. It uses a medical technology that incorporates an off the shelf Android device and a proprietary disposable electrode headset. What this piece of equipment does is it collects and records the brains electrical activity and other vital patient specific data. What this new and improved form of technology does is utilizes a classification algorithm that is created from sophisticated signal processing methods from a database of injured and non-injured patients. Basically, they use healthy brains

From the first football game ever played till now, the development of safety equipment has sky rocketed tremendously from the first leather helmet to the now hard plastic shelling with thick padding on the inside. The classic idea of a helmet that have been used since 1893, is to wrap the players head in a tough external shell. Over time the evolution of helmets has had significant improvements in reduced lacerations and skull fractures, however, the ability to prevent brain injury has been limited. Helmets can help reduce the size of impact forces, but they cannot counter the brain from moving within the skull. An invention called the Q-Collar, incorporates a different approach to attempt to do that. Slightly clamping down on a player’s jugular vein, causes the brain to swell and fit more snug inside the brain. Already, tests have been done and have shown major improvements however, the Q-Collar has not yet received Food and Drug Administration approval yet, and more research is still needed. Not only could this have major benefits in athletics, this could also benefit automobile accidents and military operations. More than just developing safe equipment is being done. The simple modification of changing what the sport of football is played on to help reduce concussions are