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High-tech helmet may help indicate injury

LEBANON, N.H. — A high-tech helmet invented by a New Hampshire company is helping football teams and the military learn more about head injuries.

The helmet and sensors created by research-and-development company Simbex LLC measures and records the force of impacts to the head. The system already is being used by many football teams looking to detect and prevent injuries. The military also has ordered some of the systems.

The Head Impact Telemetry System, or HIT system, includes a helmet and data transmitter and a console and can monitor dozens of football players or soldiers simultaneously.

The company says the system detects, records and analyzes helmet impacts, sending a warning to a coach or military commander if any impact has a potential of causing a concussion or other brain injury.

But it also helps match what kind of hit a player took with a resulting injury, a key to prevention and treatment.

The technology has been used on football fields across the country since 2004, with more than 350,000 head impacts collected and analyzed from more than 500 college and high school athletes, the company said on its Web site.

In September, the National Institutes of Health awarded the company a five-year, $3.6 million research grant to work with Dartmouth Medical School, Dartmouth College, Rhode Island Hospital, Brown University, Virginia Tech and Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine on the helmet project.

The goal is to improve the understanding of mild traumatic brain injury to develop new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat the injuries, said inventor and Simbex President Richard Greenwald. The project will study men’s football teams and men’s and women’s hockey teams, he said. Each of the research locations will measure and record the number of head impacts, the time of the impact and the location and duration of the impact. The information will be correlated to injuries and clinical follow up.

Simbex will analyze the information to determine which types of impacts and what frequency of impacts lead to head injuries.

The company said it has sold 20 combat helmets equipped with sensors to the Army to monitor bomb blasts and is working on a deal to sell high-tech ski helmets as well.

Co-inventor Joseph J. Crisco III will work on the research at Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University.

“The ability to capture large amounts of field data on head impacts and to correlate those impacts with actual diagnosed concussions and the clinical data associated with those injuries is unprecedented, and will certainly lead to new findings and opportunities for preventing and treating sports-related brain injury,” he said.

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