IoT & AI: Kicking Concussion into Touch?

Of all the people you could imagine going to a sporting event, such as the recent NFL London leg or the first round of the Six Nations this weekend, who would be the least likely? And your parents or partner don’t count.

The answer, for the purposes of this article anyway, is AI, with a bit of help from the Internet of Things (IoT).

Whilst a silent spectator, artificial intelligence could become of equal value to contact sports as the paying punter, particularly as research into CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and other long-term head-injury related issues expands.

The NFL’s “Digital Athlete”, developed with the help of AWS (Amazon Web Services), is a machine learning program that utilises TV imagery and embedded sensors in helmets, mouth guards, and shoulder pads to determine the damage done by each hit on players and the impacts thereof.

The Digital Athlete creates a replica of the player in a virtual environment and, using its artificial intelligence capabilities and the feedback from the IoT side of things, pinpoints where the impact is felt and the injuries that derive from it. It can also determine a course of action for the player in minutes, which would normally take a coaching and medical team hours to plan and execute.

In this virtual environment, the potential game scenarios it can simulate are endless. This means that, on top of keeping track of live player safety in the game happening in real-time, it can also be used to trial new safety equipment, rule changes, and will eventually be able to predict recovery times for players injured.

You don’t need to be a sports fan to recognise how much of a game-changer (no pun intended) this could be, both in terms of how the game is played and how players are protected during and after their careers.

In the Rugby world, it’s fair to say that things have progressed slightly more sluggishly than in the NFL.

Due to there being significantly less protection (or not, depending on who you ask) on rugby players than American football players, the tackling technique in the two sports differs almost completely.

Whilst American football players are taught to throw everything at their opposition to take them down, rugby players are taught to tackle below the waist and wrap their arms, thereby avoiding head-on-head contact in the round and using the strength of their extremities more than their sheer weight to bring down their opponent.

This also means that there are far fewer ways in which World Rugby, the sport’s governing body, can implement things like machine learning programs and sensors to track live play. Luckily, players are required to wear mouth guards when playing, so this is exactly where they are looking to improve their analytical capabilities.

In contrast to the rather sporadic adoption of this technology in the NFL, World Rugby recommended in October 2023 that the technology be trialled in the WXV competition — rugby’s latest professional competition which involves all international women’s sides — and that they will be investing €2m into the development of the technology for its eventual adoption across the board in the near future.

Presumably, though it hasn’t been stated by World Rugby themselves, they will also be looking into adopting the same machine learning technology that the NFL is using to trial rule changes and predict player recovery times.

Whilst this is all welcome news, and these developments in diagnostic ability are only going to make the playing field safer for those involved, it has come after a plethora of evidence has been presented and an inordinate amount of time has passed since the discovery of the very issues this is looking to curtail.

The first instance of CTE being discovered in NFL players was in 2002, and the NFL began tightening their rules back in 2009 and finally settled their lawsuit surrounding it in 2015. Rugby’s governing body, on the other hand, only introduced the same rule-tightening in 2014 and its lawsuit is still ongoing.

That being said, without the use of technology to give a “live feed” of a player’s body, there are still ways in which athletes are trying to beat the system in order to avoid missing game time due to head injuries.

Particularly in the NFL — though it’s not unfeasible that this would also happen in rugby — players receive incentives to compete in matches, so if they’re injured or unable to take part in the next game, they lose out on a significant amount of money as a result.

Therefore, anecdotes have been shared by former players about them telling their teammates to grab their knee or another part of their body in order to pretend they’ve injured something else after a head collision, thereby avoiding the concussion recovery rules that would keep them from playing.

Without the use of this mixture of IoT and AI, that is a very difficult problem to solve as there are very few rules that could be implemented and properly policed that would have the desired effect. However, if a medical diagnosis does not require the patient’s description of the problem to be accurate, all that could change.

It shouldn’t be underestimated the impact that the introduction of this technology will have on these two sports, and others thereafter. However, it also cannot be ignored that the NFL and World Rugby have been slow at best, and negligent at worst, in their tackling of this issue.