Hi everyone! Since this is our team’s first blog, I am going to start off by introducing the project and our goals.
Background Information
We are Impact Health and our primary objective is to proactively detect forces to the head that could potentially result in concussions in real time in athletes who participate in high impact sports. Concussions are extremely common in athletes that participate in high impact sports such as football, hockey, kendo, and more. Early detection and treatment is crucial for recovery.
Our team is working on creating a Smart Headband with pressure sensors and accelerometers with integrated cutting edge software that can be placed underneath a helmet and is able to continuously detect head impacts in real time and store the data which can be analyzed by medical professionals. If the force exceeds a certain threshold, an alert will be sent to a communicating device such that the supervising party can take the player out of the game to get accessed by an athletic therapist.
Progress from Last Term
The last four months have mainly involved research and planning. Mechanical, electrical, and software details have been defined. A list of materials has been purchased and delivered. A prototype was also designed to test individual components using Arduino UNO (which will not be used for the final product) as well as the data output. At this point, the team realized that the IMU would not be sufficient in terms of acceleration accuracy. A higher quality accelerometer was purchased for the final product. An image of the prototype is displayed below.
The next blog post will be about the progress made in the month of January with more specific details on front-end development.
See you next time!
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