Newslink: Biomarker for Concussions Discovered
Many of us played contact sports growing up, I know I did and I also know that I saw stars. Back in the day people weren't so cognizant of the potential long term issues that come from concussions and so nobody really thought much of it. Get your bell rung, well just shake it off you're young, you'll be fine. However we have come to understand that this is not necessarily the case, and that repeated head trauma can cause a lot of issues for people (both memory issues, as well as emotional problems can result from repeated head injuries, even non severe ones). There are a lot of protocols to aide physicians/coaches/parents to help determine whether their players/children/friends have gotten concussed and to help them keep their marbles in their heads. However these protocols are just not reliable enough and many people who are getting concussions may be missed.
Recent research coming out of Northwestern university have developed a test where the brain is stimulated with by sounds, and the activation pattern monitored by EEG. The concussed brain has a different pattern of activation then the non-concussed brain. Researchers were able to identify 90% of concussions with only a 5% false positive rate through this testing. Significantly improving reliability over current methods. Since the test only requires three electrodes, and relatively simple instrumentation it would be relatively inexpensive to have present at schools/sports facilities to allow for rapid and reliable detection of head trauma and potentially improve the future lives of our children and athletes. Perhaps devices utilizing smart phones for analysis and visualization could be created further speeding up the process and keeping costs low.
For additional information/reading check out the following:
Thumbnail/Title Image is creative commons from flickr.com
What if we were to mobilize all the coding talent here on Steemit to build this application and then reinvest all the profits back into Steemit.
Well it's more than just a program, would have to engineer some sort of instrument and have some means to produce, and sell the combined package. Though it's not a bad idea :)
A cell phone app would be so great, and should not seem so difficult to built since the medical apparatus is pretty simple. Let's keep an eye on the (hopefully close) future!
Yeah there has to be a way to get the cost as low as possible for testing at places where concussions directly occur. Making the apparatus as small as possible and taking advantage of cellphones seems like a no brainier IMO.