Design of a portable system for monitoring and analysis of head shocks in helmeted sport practice

Design of a portable system for monitoring and analysis of head shocks in helmeted sport practice Purpose: A pilot study was performed to design an electronic monitoring system, to be mounted on the helmet of hockey players, capable of detecting the shocks suffered by the brain during the sport activity, and then analyzing the shocks with a finite element model of the head-brain system developed during the project. Methods and approach: A preliminary bibliographic research was carried out on the clinical point of view of the Traumatic Brain Injuries, on the statistics of head injuries in helmeted sports, on the monitoring devices of this type of injuries existing on the market and on the FEM models of the head-brain system developed over the years. Subsequently, the hardware of the monitoring system was designed, including a microcontroller, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a micro-SD card on which to write data, and it was programmed in the Arduino IDE. An application for Android smartphones was developed in the MIT AppInventor environment, to report the shock, via Bluetooth Low Energy connection, to the medical staff on the sidelines. A finite element model of the head, composed by the skull, brain, cerebellum, corpus callosum, Cerebrospinal fluid, brainstem, neck and helmet, was designed on Abaqus using geometric simplifications, without a biomedical imaging basis. Multiphysics simulations were carried out on the finite element model of the head, by forcing as input the shock data acquired by the monitoring system, simulating an analysis process post-game. Findings: The monitoring system showed competitive performance in terms of measurement range and resolution compared to other devices on the market, and an improvement due to its consideration of the two types of acceleration. Concerning the costs, only the values of the individual components can be assessed, the device can be miniaturized and implanted on a real helmet in the future and the cost of packaging can be estimated. The computational time of the multiphysics simulation does not allow a real-time analysis of shocks. The finite element model, however, has showed good performances in computational terms (even less than 1 hour of calculations), thanks to the geometric simplifications with which it was designed. The clinical consequence of the impact can be assessed at the end of the match by the team's medical-scientific staff by analyzing the internal parameters of the brain, first of all the Intracranial Pressure. The system is presented as a support tool for diagnostics and clinical analysis, not a replacement for them.