Yahoo Autos Using Virtual Reality Goggles to Treat Racing Injuries
Hey, watch your head. Concussions are in the news. Martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey is talking about head injuries to CBS Sports. Meanwhile, Outside magazine wonders if bike racer Aleksandr Vlasov may have been cleared to race too soon in the Tour de France after a nasty crash. Not even royalty is immune, as Princess Anne makes headlines after a fall from a horse. Brain trauma has been a topic in motorsports for decades, but NHRA Funny Car champ John Force's high-speed wall hit in June brought it back to the front pages, as did F1 racer Max Verstappen's recent admission that he's been suffering vision problems from a crash three years ago.
Despite the incredible advances in safety, racing series (and other sports) are still having trouble preventing and recognizing head injuries. This is because a hard hit can cause injury even when a person's exterior appears unharmed. David Stevens, head of Medical and Research at Asia Pacific, NeuroFlex—a company using VR tools to track brain health—says that protecting the brain is more complex than simply wearing a helmet. Because the brain isn't pressed hard up against the inside of your skull, high g-forces can move and damage it, even if the outside of your head is ok. Stevens says "coup-contrecoup" injuries are common in high impact activities like racing, motorcycle riding, and football. Coup-contrecoup sounds like a ballet move but refers to a hit hard enough that your gray matter gets bounced back and forth inside your head.
Sometimes the hit is so hard that you don't need to be a medical professional to recognize the need for a hospital visit. Force's 300-mph-to zer0 impact left him with clear impairment and confusion, but Stevens says many concussions go undiagnosed, or undiagnosed until secondary symptoms show up. This is partly because there hasn't been much research into mobile testing or setting baselines for normal brain function in high-risk athletes.
"In the past," says Stevens, "you had your traditional 'follow my finger with your eyes' test in the field." That movement tracking test is called "vestibular ocular motor screening," and it's a quick way of checking if your brain and eyes are in sync—one of the few physical signs of concussion being impaired visual responses. "It's called a VOMS assessment for short," says Stevens. "Which is, at least in Australia, a bit of an unfortunate acronym." It is, but also accurate, since concussion can result in dizziness and nausea. You'll often see the finger VOMS test in boxing and racing movies, and Stevens says that while it is a good tool, it doesn't offer a way of recording or tracking progress. That has traditionally required much more equipment and a hospital stay. What NeuroFlex aims to do is use portable VR goggles that can track eye movements and a laptop recording the data to make the more detailed VOMS test portable and affordable.
Stevens and the NeuroFlex team are hoping that the technology will encourage athletes to record baseline brain health assessments before any injuries so that recovery can be tracked and treatment can be optimized. "Right now some would argue that the onus is on the athlete [to know when they are well enough to return to action]," he says. "There's a desire for improvement in the concussion protocols. We're working with a growing number of clinicians where we undertake a preseason baseline test. Then after an injury they'll come back in and they can use the NeuroFlex as essentially objective data to identify when they are ready to return to play. It takes the guesswork out, and if there is a clear impairment, then we can arrange therapists who can address it, instead of waiting for two weeks to see how it goes."
For Emma Gilmour, a rally driver in New Zealand and a former McLaren factory racer, NeuroFlex has been an important part of her recovery following a rollover crash in the 2023 season of the electric off-road series, Extreme E. As a 20-year veteran racer, it was not her first or even the most violent crash she'd experienced. "It was a strange kind of accident," she says. "In the very first crash I had [2007], my seat broke so I came loose in my belts. I smashed my helmet on a roll bar, and I had really bad dizziness. I'd get vertigo for a long time. It was a quite obvious injury. This [2023] one, I never really got knocked out. I think it was just a really high-speed spins. I blacked out, so didn't have that single impact, but everything was definitely shook up in there. I'm not so dizzy like the first one, but I really battled with fatigue in my recovery this time."
It would have been easy for Gilmour to write off the symptoms and get right back to racing. That's what she did the first time she crashed, and this one seemed like a smaller event, but she was already working with NeuroFlex as part of a research program, and the data they had helped her realize that the rollover had exacerbated her previous injury.
"I'd taken part in this Ph.D. study, and it highlighted at the time that I still had some residual effects from my first crash back in 2007. These were things that I was kind of aware of, but I didn't really know how to pinpoint it or make it better. They set me up with a rehab program where I went in and used the NeuroFlex to improve my eye movement and ocular motion. I was doing this prior to having the McLaren crash, and when I did, I was then able to go back in and keep doing the rehab work, and see what progress I'd lost from having the accident. And the thing that was quite encouraging was that I hadn't lost that much. I wasn't as good as I was before, but I didn't revert all the way back. I wouldn't have known about all of that if I hadn't been part of the Ph.D. study."
Both Gilmour and Stevens say there's a tendency for brain injury to be low priority, both from the point of view of athletes and their coaches and sponsors. "There's that whole mentality of 'shake it off,'" says Gilmour. "But we now know that that's not the right approach for a head injury, that it can cause health issues later." Stevens says it's important to spread the message that one concussion ups the likelihood of another, and it's not just physical symptoms that can result. "There are mental health effects," he says. "Depression, anxiety. Concussion is multifaceted, but as you treat one area [for example, an optical delay], it sort has a spreading effect that it will help other areas as well."
Technology like NeuroFlex is not a replacement for track improvements like SAFER barriers or head and neck protection, but the more available it becomes, the sooner racers can identify and address their brain health, which may help prevent more crashes in the future. In the meantime, wear your helmet, and take any hard hit to the head seriously. Your brain will thank you.
You Might Also Like
