IT's Impact on Impact

In sports, athletes taking a beating both mentally and physically isn’t very far gone from being an everyday occurrence, especially in combat sports such as boxing and mixed martial arts. As a Celtics fan, looking back on the history of their run during the 1980’s and early 1990’s is astounding when you consider the level of pain Larry Bird had in his back.

More recently, however, IT has made strides toward understanding the repercussions of physical injuries that can, and are, sustained in sports. One interesting article I came across from the South Bend Tribune made note of the fact that Notre Dame, along with Washington and Stanford, will be testing out “intelligent mouthguards” for their football players this season. Developed by Seattle-based company X2IMPACT, the 22 custom-fit mouthguards will use acceleration and rotation sensors to monitor contact in measurements of “g-force”. Records of the impact will be recorded on the sidelines, with the results making progress towards developing ways to improve safety not only for college athletes, but for all athletes.

You may have noticed a segment entitled “Sports Science” where IT’s innovative techniques toward understanding how athletes function and perform bring you to the forefront of how statistics can be measured in 2011. A consistent theme of the show is that of force, and how it is measured, which can be seen below in a clip pitting the impact of two sumo wrestlers colliding against the force of a punch from Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, a current stand-out in the mixed martial arts organization the UFC’s Light Heavyweight division.

Because impact is such a factor in combat sports, new technology can and should be used to try and understand exactly how damage to a fighter can be reduced in the long term, though taking consecutive blows to the head and body isn’t exactly the best way to ensure a hazard-free bill of health. However, tools such as CompuBox and CompuStrike have been used to record numbers of blows thrown and landed during fights, with HBO’s Boxing team taking it up a notch with PunchZone statistics that show exactly where, and how many, punches landed on fighters during their bouts. Hopefully, this could lead to strides being made in IT towards protecting athletes so that another tragic story like Gerald McClellan’s does not happen again.