Session: 05-11-01: Musculoskeletal and Sports Biomechanics I

Paper Number: 72094

Start Time: Friday, 02:05 PM

72094 - Design of Human Head and Neck Replica to Facilitate Concussion and Tbi Research 

            Improving concussion technology and researching more about the motion of the brain is vital to developing safer methods to play for athletes and others around the world. The key to furthering research surrounding concussions is to dive deeper into the effect a hit to the head has on the brain. Most areas of this research look to analyze and track the movement of the head. As this may offer an idea as to what happens to the brain, there is still a completely different motion that the brain experiences during a hit. The goal of this project is to offer a realistic method to analyze the motion of the brain via a head and neck replica model. By creating a model with a human like brain within it, the motion of the brain can be tracked via an accelerometer placed at the center. Our hopes with this project are to shed light on the lasting damage concussions can do to the brain and potentially further concussion prevention technology. 

The jerking motion of the brain after a big impact can cause it to hit the skull and damage the neural network of the brain. Due to the consistent contact to the head, concussions are very common within many sports, such as American football. A study from the American Medical Society shows that out of the six high schools researched, five of those schools have football as their leading cause of concussions. Due to this rise in awareness about concussions within sports, research within the field has expanded greatly. The research that has been conducted revolves around multiple topics such as movement of the brain, movement of the neck, and angle in which the head has been hit. While concussion research has come a long way, it is still limited by human participants. Concussion research is hard to test on a human head due to the delicate nature of the brain. Researchers in the past have constructed models’ heads with accelerometers on them to test this. As this research is good, it does not include how the brain absorbs this force and how much it moves around within the skull. What this project aims to accomplish is to create a head and neck model that can more accurately track the actual motion of the brain. The purpose of creating this model would be to further the understanding of how the brain reacts to certain blows within different scenarios.

Presenting Author: Peyman Honarmandi Manhattan College

Authors:

Elias Awikeh Manhattan College
Peyman Honarmandi Manhattan College