NFL Preparing to Embed Processors and Accelerometers in Player Helmets

This is only somewhat related, but I lost a lot of enthusiasm for football after stories about this kind of tech triggered an overdose on wikipedia and news articles. The historical resistance to concussion research in the NFL left me with a sour taste. Repeated minor concussions are likely to cause later dementia, and I don't really feel very good about watching football players (linemen, mostly) destroy their brains in such a way. I don't know how aware of the danger they are, but gah.<p>It's odd, too, because I do enjoy other sporting events that can have long lasting injury problems, and I really like mixed martial arts. I don't know why exactly football makes me feel skeevy these days and the other sports don't, but there it is. It may be that I can fathom living a full and complete life with, say, blown out knees, but can't even comprehend what it's like to experience Alzheimer's.<p>I also worry (with some incidental evidence) that improvements in helmet tech have actually amplified the problem. If my head is "safely" encased in space age materials, I'm much more likely to use it to whack on people. I suspect linemen and "dirty" defensive players would play a totally different game if the risk to their face and head was more obvious.<p>An interesting link: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/sports/football/30dementia.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/sports/football/30dementia...</a>

This kind of technology doesn't translate down to the lower levels such as high school, junior high, and pee wee leagues. Nor is the medical expertise required to interpret it readily available at those levels. The approach is cost prohibitive and dubious from a social engineering perspective. Besides, the issue is not really one of data collection.<p>The issue of concussions won't be solved by technology. It will be solved by officiating. FIFA figured out how to manage player safety decades ago...send off players who endanger opponents and make their team play with ten.<p>Using officiating rather than technology as the means of protecting players translates to all levels of the game...and therefore, becomes accepted by fans and players over the course of a few years.

I saw the intel booth at SC that was demoing this stuff. It was pretty cool. One thing that would help the researchers working on this would be more data and the NFL doing this for all helmets could be valuable.<p>It would be pretty cool to also see the changes in the brains of players over their career. It might be hard to shove a bunch of football players into a MRI machine but the info that could be gathered from that would be very interesting I think.<p>This work also has application to other things like head trauma from car accidents as an example.

Require helmets with at least 2 inches of shock absorbing foam around the exterior of the shell of the helmet. But then the players will just butt heads even harder.