CONFERENCE: The Application of Instrumented Mouthguards to Optimise Player Welfare

1200

Welcome

Prof. Ben Jones

Leeds Beckett University, UK,

Rugby Football League, UK

1210

Opening; Opportunities for sports technology

Laurence Geller CBE

Love of the Game

1230

Concussion in sport; Where are we now, and what does the future hold?

A/Prof. Andrew Gardner

University of Newcastle, Australia

1300

Measuring head acceleration in sport; From helmets to instrumented mouthguards

Dr Steve Rowson

Virginia Tech, USA

1330

Break

1400

The validity of current instrumented mouthguards

Prof. Ben Jones

Leeds Beckett University, UK

1415

Evaluating signal quality when evaluating instrumented mouthguard performance

Dr Greg Tierney

University of Ulster, UK

1430

From mouthguards to computer vision: towards a holistic approach to monitoring and preventing head injury

Prof. Constantin Coussios,

A/Prof. Jeroen Bergmann University of Oxford, UK

1500

How to measure a head impact: tips, tricks and pearls of wisdom

Dr Adam Bartsch

Prevent Biometric

1520

Break

1550

Monitoring load in rugby union using instrumented mouthguards

Mike Lancaster

Harlequins Rugby Union

1610

Translating head impacts and head acceleration to brain injury

Dr Mazdak Ghajari

Imperial College London, UK

Studying the electrophysiological consequences of concussion using brain slice cultures

Prof. Barclay Morrison III

  Columbia University in the City of New York, USA

All speakers

Leeds Rhinos v Wigan Warriors

(Headingley Stadium 2000 KO)

Tickets for the match and hospitality will be provided at the end of day 1

930

Welcome

Prof. Keith Stokes

University of Bath, UK

Rugby Football Union, UK

945

Bridging the gaps across concussion surveillance, video-analysis, and biomechanics: A multidisciplinary approach informing concussion prevention in youth rugby.

Prof. Carolyn Emery

University of Calgary, Canada

1030

The application of instrumented mouthguards in boxing

Prof. Mike Loosemore

English Institute of Sport, UK,

Dr Chris Jones

Swansea University, UK

1050

Break

1120

Brain health and professional football (soccer)

Patrick Riley

Premier League, UK

Dr Dominic Townsend

Premier League and University of Birmingham, UK

1140

The impact of law changes to the rugby union tackle on concussion

Prof. Keith Stokes

University of Bath, UK

Rugby Football Union, UK

1200

       Can the tackle ever be safe?

Dr Sharief Hendricks

University of Cape Town, SA

1220

Lunch

1330

Concussion in women's rugby: A discussion on differences

Nic Jones

Tom Morris

Progressive Rugby, UK

1350

The application of instrumented mouthguards to support concussion diagnosis and management in sport

Panel discussion

Dr Daniel Tadmor (chair)

Dr Simon Kemp

Dr Gemma Phillips

Mr Tom Grundy

Prof. Mike Loosemore

Prof. Nick Pearce

Dr Charlotte Cowie

Break

1500

The application of Instrumented mouthguards in rugby league; the TaCKLE project

Prof. Ben Jones

Leeds Beckett University, UK,

Rugby Football League, UK

1520

The application of Instrumented mouthguards in rugby union (RFU)

Prof. Keith Stokes

University of Bath, UK

Rugby Football Union, UK

1540

The application of Instrumented mouthguards in rugby union (World Rugby)

World Rugby

1600

Discussion

All speakers

(Chair Prof. Kevin Till)

1700

BBQ

Love of the Game, Laurence Geller CBE

Love of the Game (LOTG) is a campaign to reduce concussion-related issues across sport. LOTG takes a solutions-based approach, it develops rapid actionable technologies that prevent, diagnose and treat head injuries in sport. LOTG are an impassioned group of athletes, players, fans, medics, academics and innovators, united by their love of sport and the desire to protect players of all ages from the potentially devastating impact of head injuries while protecting the integrity of the sports we know and love.

Laurence Geller CBE is the chairman of LOTG. He is an accomplished businessman and entrepreneur who has led multinational corporations in hospitality. Laurence founded and managed Strategic Hotels & Resorts, a New York Stock Exchange listed owner of 18 luxury hotels, including the Four Seasons in Washington D.C. and the InterContinental in Miami. Previously, he held positions as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Hyatt Development Corporation, where he jointly founded Classic Residences, a US nationwide senior living and healthcare company. Laurence has personally donated more than US$20 million cumulatively to a variety of humanitarian, cultural and civic causes over the years. He is a leading expert in the area of geriatric healthcare, currently serves as Global Business Ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society and has become the largest dementia care philanthropist in the UK. He was awarded a CBE by the Queen in the 2012 New Year’s Honours List. Laurence also serves as the Chancellor of the University of West London. The university has a major nursing school and houses the London Geller School of Hospitality and Tourism. In 2018, Laurence donated £1 million to establish a new Institute for Dementia Care, the U.K.’s first comprehensive dementia care training and accreditation program.

     A/Prof. Andrew Gardner

Associate Professor Gardner is a clinical neuropsychologist and mid-career research fellow with the School of Medicine & Public Health at The University of Newcastle, Australia. He serves as a member of the World Rugby Concussion working group, he is the concussion consultant to Rugby Australia, and he is a member of the AFL concussion scientific advisory group. His research and clinical interests cover the full spectrum of concussion, from injury prevention with tackle techniques, to injury identification via video analysis and instrumented technology, to acute assessment through the validation of various measures, to the evaluation of later-in-life brain and mental health of former athletes. The translational focus of these research programs aims to advance knowledge and improve health care by generating evidence-informed data to advance policy development.

       Dr Steve Rowson

Steve Rowson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech and serves as the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab director. His expertise is in injury biomechanics, concussion, and safe product design and assessment. Steve has been collecting head acceleration data from athletes over the past 16 years and used these data to make sports safer through rule changes and improved protective equipment.

       Prof. Ben Jones

Ben is a Professor at Leeds Beckett University, receiving his professorship at the age of 31. He is also the Strategic Lead for Performance, Science and Research at the Rugby Football League, and Pathway Performance Director at Leeds Rhinos Rugby League club. He is the lead of a number of large scale research projects, including the TaCKLE project which will deploy over 1,000 instrumented mouthguards across rugby league. Ben was the lead author on the first study to investigate the transmission risk of SARS-CoV-2 in sport, and was the lead author of the Team Sport Risk Exposure Framework, which was adopted internationally during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has over 200 peer-review publications, and is frequently invited as a Keynote speaker at national and international conferences. Ben has secured over £5 million in research funding, has appeared on BBC Breakfast as an expert to comment on contemporary issues within sports science. He has also led the sports science support for a number of charity events, including the Kevin Sinfield extra mile Challenge in 2021, which raised over £2.5 million for MND.

Dr Greg Tierney

Dr Gregory Tierney is a lecturer in Biomechanics at Ulster University and leads a research group focused on understanding the mechanisms of concussion in sport. This involves approaches such as in-vivo head kinematic measurement techniques and computational biomechanical modelling. Dr Tierney has conducted research with national and international sport governing bodies (e.g., Rugby Football League, World Rugby) and his research has contributed towards policy and law changes in sport to reduce concussion injuries. Dr Tierney is an active member of the Scientific Review Committee for the International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury, Science and Medicine Research Committee at the Rugby Football League and was recently awarded the “Hans Gros Emerging Researcher Award” by the International Society of Biomechanics in Sport.

Prof. Constantin Coussios

Professor Constantin Coussios OBE FREng is the Director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Founding Director of the Podium Analytics Institute in Youth Sports Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford. He received his BA, MEng and PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and was elected to the first Statutory Chair in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford in 2011. Between 2014 and 2021, he served as Director of the £11m Oxford Centre for Drug Delivery Devices (OxCD3) supported by a national programme grant from the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in collaboration with the pharmaceutical and medical device industry: during this period, he led TarDox, a first-in-human trial of ultrasound-triggered targeted drug delivery in patients with liver tumours (Lancet Oncology 2018). Prof. Coussios received the UK’s Institute of Acoustics’ Young Person’s Award for Innovation in Acoustical Engineering in 2007, was elected as Secretary-General of the International Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound between 2006-2010 and was honoured with the Society’s Fred Lizzi award in 2012. He was elected as the youngest ever Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 2009, and received the Society’s Bruce Lindsay award in 2012. In 2008, he was one of two academic founders of the Oxford University spin-out OrganOx Ltd., which has developed a novel organ preservation device through to first-in-man trials, first sales, randomized trials (Nature 2018) and NICE and FDA approval. In 2014, he co-founded OxSonics Ltd, which is commercializing cavitation-enhanced oncological drug delivery, and in 2016 he co-founded OrthoSon Ltd,  which is developing minimally invasive replacement of the intervertebral disc. In 2017, he was awarded Silver Medal of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the translation of novel medical technologies into clinical practice, and became a Fellow of the Academy in 2019. Prof. Coussios was appointed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 Queen’s Birthday Honours list for his services to Biomedical Engineering.

       A/Prof. Jeroen Bergmann

Jeroen Bergmann is an Associate Professor in Engineering Science at the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, Group Leader of the Natural Interaction Lab, Official Fellow at Reuben College and Director of the Oxford Healthtech Labs. His research interest is in developing assistive and preventative technologies through the translation of engineering principles between domains, thus creating unique medical devices. He has experience in developing laboratory prototypes and taking them through clinical validation to make a real-world impact. His work focuses on the development, design and application of novel healthcare technologies.

       Dr Mazdak Ghajari

Dr Mazdak Ghajari is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Prof) in Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. He had a pioneering role in establishing the TBI biomechanics research area at Imperial College, bringing together engineers, neuroscientists, biologists and designers. After finishing his PhD, Mazdak was awarded an Imperial College research fellowship to launch his independent research on understanding the biomechanics of TBI and preventing it. He then joined the Dyson School of Design Engineering, where he founded the HEAD lab, an interdisciplinary research lab for understanding and preventing injury through design. He is the recipient of the young researcher award of the International Research Council of Biomechanics of Injury. Mazdak is an active member of the head protection committees of the BSI, ISO and CEN, where he is contributing to the development of new helmet test methods.

       Prof. Barclay Morrison III

Barclay Morrison, PhD. is professor of Biomedical Engineering, director of the Neurotrauma and Repair Laboratory, and serves as Vice Dean of Undergraduate Programs for the Engineering School at Columbia University. His research focuses on the biomechanics of traumatic brain injury (TBI) at the tissue level to better prevent brain injuries, and on the cellular pathways responsible for post-traumatic cell dysfunction in the search for novel therapies. He currently serves as a council member and President of the International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury, is a board member of Football Research Inc., and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Neurotrauma and Brain Multiphysics. He received his BS in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, his PhD in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and continued his academic training as a post-doctoral fellow in Clinical Neurosciences at Southampton University, UK before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 2003. Dr. Morrison is past recipient of the Rickard Skalak Best Paper Award given by the American Society for Mechanical Engineers for a publication in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering and the John Paul Stapp Award for the best paper in the Stapp Car Crash Journal. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Kim Award for Student-Faculty Involvement from Columbia Engineering, and in 2019, he was the recipient of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.

       Prof. Carolyn Emery

Carolyn Emery BScPT PhD is a physiotherapist and epidemiologist. She is a Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Cumming School of Medicine (Departments of Pediatrics and Community Health Sciences) at University of Calgary and Chair of the Sport Injury Prevention Research Centre at University of Calgary, one of 11 International Olympic Committee Centres for the Prevention of Injury and Protection of Athlete Health. Carolyn is a member of the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, O’Brien Institute of Public Health, Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the McCaig Institute of Bone and Joint Health. Carolyn holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Concussion and is a Killam Professor and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Her research program focuses on the prevention of concussions and their consequences in youth sport. Carolyn has over 250 peer-reviewed publications in the field and has supervised 80 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. She leads the pan-Canadian SHRed Concussions Research Program funding through the National Football League Play Smart Play Safe Program. Her research has informed practice and policy to reduce the public health burden of sport-related concussions and their consequences in youth.

       Prof. Mike Loosemore

Professor Mike Loosemore is an NHS Consultant in Sport and Exercise Medicine, at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health, University College London, where he treats musculoskeletal and sports injuries. In addition, he is working to promote exercise as a preventative intervention and treatment in many medical conditions. He is currently the doctor to the British Olympic Boxing and GB Snow Sports teams. He has travelled extensively with national squads, accompanying teams to Olympic and Commonwealth Games, World and European Championships. He was the Chief Medical Officer for England at the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi 2010 and Glasgow 2014. He was deputy CMO for the Rio Olympics and the CMO at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. Professor Loosemore achieved a PhD in the pathophysiology of boxing injuries. He is active in sport and exercise medicine research and has published work on various aspects of SEM. His current research interests include respiratory illness in athletes, reducing sedentary behaviour in children, physical activity in the homeless and work on concussion detection and prevention. He is active in the education of future SEM doctors. In 2011 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science for services to sports and exercise medicine. In 2014 he was awarded the Robert Atkins award for consistently valuable medical service to sport. He was made an honorary professor in Sport and Exercise Medicine at several universities both in the UK and abroad. In 2017 Professor Loosemore was awarded an MBE for his services to Sports Medicine. In 2019 Professor Loosemore became the first Professor of Sport and Exercise Medicine at University College London.

       Dr Chris Jones

Dr Chris Jones is Head of Science and Performance for Sports and Wellbeing Analytics Limited, and has also worked as a sport scientist/strength and conditioning coach in elite sport for a number of years. His research focus is on strength and injury diagnostics and contact load monitoring. A particular emphasis on instrumented mouthguards over the last 5 years and its use for data insight and practical application. Dr Jones has a number of ongoing research projects in collaboration with other universities and governing bodies from quantifying the heading demands in football to projects on modelling and AI based tool for predicting effects of head impacts on the brain in sporting collisions such as rugby and boxing.

      Dr Dominic Townsend

Dominic initially studied Sport and Exercise Science at Loughborough University and was fortunate to work with the 1st team Sport Science department at Chelsea FC. Then went on to study medicine and now has taken time out of his Neurosurgery specialty training to complete a Head Injury Research Fellowship with the Premier League. Previously played National League rugby union and now competes for Great Britain age-group triathlon at the European and World Championships.

       Progressive Rugby

Progressive Rugby is a non-profit rugby union lobby group demanding better protection for players to ensure the game continues to thrive. It is comprised of current and former players (amateur and professional); medics; academics, referees; coaches; teachers, administrators and fans, who all love rugby union and are supporters of the core physicality of the game. But around that, Progressive Rugby believes the game could do much more to protect players at all levels of the game from brain trauma and broken bodies. Progressive Rugby are independent and working with World Rugby to identify solutions to ensure the long term survival of the game.

       Prof. Keith Stokes

Professor Keith Stokes is Director of the Centre for Health and Injury and Illness Prevention in Sport at the University of Bath and is Medical Research Lead at the Rugby Football Union. He has established strong partnerships with stakeholders in Rugby Union and a range of other sports to investigate injury risk and to develop and evaluate strategies to reduce injury risk. He has published over 150 articles in journals such as the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Sports Medicine, American Journal of Sports Medicine, International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, and the Journal of Applied Physiology. Keith is editor for the International Journal of Sports Medicine, is on the editorial board of PLoS ONE, and is on the Advisory Board (Biological Sciences) of the Journal of Sports Sciences. He is a Fellow of the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences.

       Dr Sharief Hendricks

Dr Sharief Hendricks is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town and a Visiting Fellow at Leeds Beckett University (UK). He has been awarded the prestigious University of Cape Town Fellows Young Researcher Award (2019), a two-time finalist for the TW Kambule-NSTF Researcher Award (2020 and 2021) (an award for South Africa’s top scientist) and listed on the Mail and Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans (2019). He has also been awarded the European College of Sport Science Fellowship (FECSS) for his significant contribution to the field. He is currently the President-Elect of the South African Sports Medicine Association, and Chair of Research and Science for the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee’s (SASCOC) and Lead Researcher for the South African Cricketers’ Association. He is currently an Associate Editor for Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport and BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Science, and has been Social Media Editor for the European Journal of Sport Science for 8 years. Sharief has over 90 peer-reviewed publications. His primary research focus is improving player welfare and reducing the risk of injury while maximising performance in tackle-based sports such as the Rugby codes: Union, League and Sevens. Subsequently, his research team has identified mechanisms and key risk factors for tackle injury and determinants of performance and has informed policy, designed and developed novel tackle training and testing equipment and guidelines. Sharief’s further research interest in science communication and stakeholder engagement is reflected in two leading science communication websites—HealthScienceReviews.com (https://healthsciencereviews.com) and RugbyScientists.com (https://rugbyscientists.com).