Smart mouthguard to be adopted by World Rugby to help spot head injuries

By Trevor Mogg October 10, 2023

Players in a rugby game. — Patrick Case/Pexels

Rugby is a highly physical sport in which little protective gear is worn, so players feel the full force of every impact.

One device that some players do wear is a mouthguard, which protects players from mouth lacerations and tooth damage.

In a move to increase the safety of the sport, rugby union’s world governing body, World Rugby, has announced that it will start using mouthguards fitted with smart technology that’s capable of detecting high levels of acceleration and head impacts in real time.

Data from the smart mouthguards will be sent immediately to pitch-side doctors, enabling quick decisions to be made about whether a player needs to be taken off for detailed checks following a heavy impact during a game.

World Rugby’s interest in the mouthguard grew after research in ice hockey found that as well as protecting against dental injuries, the mouthguards also reduced the risk of concussion by 20%.

The new technology will be debuted later this month in the professional women’s WXV international rugby competition.

World Rugby is making an initial investment of 2 million euros (about $2.12 million) to support rugby unions, competitions, and clubs to pave the way for wide adoption of the new smart mouthguard technology, which is supplied by Prevent Biometrics. The U.S. company has been developing the mouthguard for many years, and so its adoption by World Rugby is a notable development.

Dr Eanna Falvey, chief medical officer of World Rugby, said: “The latest scientific research and expert opinion is telling us one thing — reduce the forces players experience on their heads at all levels of the game. That is exactly what we’re doing.”

Falvey added: “The advances in smart mouthguard technology mean elite players will be better cared for than ever before. We are taking smart mouthguards out of the realm of medical research and putting them into the world of everyday performance management to continue to manage player welfare in the best way possible.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Computing

How Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to take on Apple

An Intel Meteor Lake system-on-a-chip.

It seems like Apple might need to watch out, because Intel and Microsoft are coming for it after the latter two companies reportedly forged a close partnership during the development of Intel Lunar Lake chips. Lunar Lake refers to Intel's upcoming generation of mobile processors that are aimed specifically at the thin and light segment. While the specs are said to be fairly modest, some signs hint that Lunar Lake may have enough of an advantage to pose a threat to some of the best processors.

Today's round of Intel Lunar Lake leaks comes from Igor's Lab. The system-on-a-chip (SoC), pictured above, is Intel's low-power solution made for thin laptops that's said to be coming out later this year. Curiously, the chips weren't manufactured on Intel's own process, but on TSMC's N3B node. This is an interesting development because Intel typically sticks to its own fabs, and it even plans to sell its manufacturing services to rivals like AMD. This time, however, Intel opted for the N3B node for its compute tile.

Computing

How much does an AI supercomputer cost? Try $100 billion

A Microsoft datacenter.

It looks like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora, among other projects, are about to get a lot more juice. According to a new report shared by The Information, Microsoft and OpenAI are working on a new data center project, one part of which will be a massive AI supercomputer dubbed "Stargate." Microsoft is said to be footing the bill, and the cost is astronomical as the name of the supercomputer suggests -- the whole project might cost over $100 billion.

Spending over $100 billion on anything is mind-blowing, but when put into perspective, the price truly shows just how big a venture this might be: The Information claims that the new Microsoft and OpenAI joint project might cost a whopping 100 times more than some of the largest data centers currently in operation.

Computing

There’s an unexpected, new competitor in PC gaming

Snapdragon's X Elite PC SoC.

Windows gaming on ARM is becoming a legitimate possibility, and it's not just thanks to the recently unveiled emulation options, but it's chiefly due to the fact that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is shaping up to be pretty excellent. Spotted in a recent benchmark, the CPU was seen beating some of the best processors on the current market. Are we finally at a point where it's not always going to be a choice between just Intel and AMD?

The benchmarks were posted by user @techinmul on Twitter, and the results couldn't be more promising for the upcoming Qualcomm processor. The chip was tested in Geekbench 6, and although it's important not to take these results entirely at face value, it's an impressive show of performance that bodes well for upcoming thin and light laptops.