Of the 1.7 million TBI injuries in the U.S each year, more than 750,000 are considered mild, and over 173,000 are related to recreational and sports activities. In the last decade, emergency visits for mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) among highly vulnerable populations such as children and developing youth have increased by more than 60 percent.
The National Football League www.nfl.com, GE www.ge.com, and Under Armour www.underarmour.com have selected a team of physicians and engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) www.gatech.com and Emory University www.emory.edu as winners in the Head Health Challenge II, a competition for new innovations to speed diagnosis and to improve treatment for concussions.
Seven winning teams of Head Health Challenge II were announced November 13, 2014 and selected from more than 500 submissions. Each member of the team will receive $500,000 to develop new innovations and technologies intended to identify, measure, and mitigate brain injury. The first round of winners will be eligible for an additional $1 million after a second phase of judging.
The Atlanta team worked to develop “Integrated Display Enhanced Testing for Cognitive Impairment and mTBI” or referred to as iDETECT. The partner institutions forming the iDETECT team with Georgia Tech and Emory also received financial support from the University of Rochester www.rochester.edu, Department of Defense www.defense.gov, and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation www.whcf.org.
iDETECT is an easy to administer, portable, and immersive system that integrates multiple concussion tests within one platform. The system is a rapidly deployed easily administered comprehensive system designed to improve neurologic assessment following mTBI. The next generation iDETECT system will be further tested in a clinical study comparing the system outcomes against other traditional mTBI screening tools.
The iDETECT project was initiated by David Wright, Director of Emergency Neurosciences at the Emory University School of Medicine www.med.emory.edu and Michelle LaPlaca, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
In 2011, the project evolved from a single neurocognitive approach to detect concussions to an extended multi-model platform when the partnership broadened to include Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) http://grti.gatech.edu after critical systems engineering, human factors, and military medical operational expertise was added.