The University of Texas’ football club has hired a new coach Tom Herman, last November, and ever since that it has been a centre of attention. Aggressive recruits and installing new lockers with innovative technology has kept Herman a part of the headlines ever since he came to Austin. Herman’s latest tweets showed his strong commitment towards player safety by using groundbreaking technology introduced by Riddell, the helmet manufacturer.
In the previous month, Herman posted a two-minute long video on his Twitter, presenting Anthony Pass who is a Head Football Athletic Trainer. In that video, Pass talked over about the Riddell Insite Impact Response System, which helps record and track the major and crucial head collisions received to a player during a game or practice. Pass said that Texas has been the first ever Power 5 school that has successfully integrated the Riddell technology into every helmet. The Longhorns have been using the Riddell technology before the 2016 season.
“Within each helmet, there is a set of sensors,” Pass said. “When this helmet takes a hit, the sensors record it. The sensors determine what level of hit it was.”
There is device along with the sensors in the helmets which receives the information from the sensors and processes it.
The Insite system in the Riddell helmets has been designed in such a way that it determines the direction and the force of a hit along with the repeated hits taken to certain areas of the helmet. HITsp, an advanced head collision exposure metric which help analyze and calculate the linear and circular acceleration, location and duration of a hit and combines them into a single measurement. With this data in hand the coaches and trainers will be able to assess the concussion and symptoms effectively in order to avoid any serious injury.
“We are 100 percent monitored both in practice and in games,” Pass said. “By doing that, I feel we are achieving our mission of protecting those athletes and can really help us manage those concussion injuries.”
