INNOVATION November-December 2022

Study data captured through mouthguards. P hoto : K ai J acobson /UBC

the acceleration of the head passes that threshold. Combined with the clinical outcomes information, eventually we hope to be able to define the threshold of injury from even very low acceleration levels—the little impacts where the brain trauma would not reach the level of clinical concussion—because even mild brain trauma means the athlete should take some time for recovery. These kinds of impacts occur frequently and they are usually not monitored by the teams. Only the clinical concussions are looked at and treated in sports.” In addition to the continuing ice hockey research, Wu and her team are currently collaborating with the UBC women’s soccer team to gather data on impacts associated with “heading” and are starting a new collaboration with the UBC women’s varsity rugby team. “We want to gather more female athlete data to fill that gap of knowledge,” said Wu, “and try to understand whether there may be biological or anatomical reasons, potentially weaker necks, for example, coming into play and causing higher incidence of concussion and more severe impacts in women athletes.” Over the next few years, Wu would like to see the data she has collected, on both male and female athletes, translated not only into a commercially available mouthguard for sports teams to use “for more reliable and timely diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury,” but also, eventually, into “a wearable sensor that anyone interested in tracking their own impact exposure can purchase, so that our research will start to benefit people in a real way.”

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