Minneapolis, MN – Late last week World Rugby announced a groundbreaking player welfare study through an innovative partnership with New Zealand Rugby, University of Otago, and Prevent Biometrics. The primary initiative of the project will be focused on quantifying the nature and frequency of head impacts in men’s & women’s community age-grade rugby.
As a a leader in the industry, Prevent Biometrics has a rich history of independent-research validation. Prevent’s ability to accurately measure and report head impacts through a platform that can easily scale across a 700 athlete population was a key differentiator for World Rugby.
World Rugby Chief Medical Officer Dr Éanna Falvey said: “Player welfare continues to be our top priority. By continually commissioning and partnering in research, we can make evidence-based decisions that will advance our understanding of injuries in the sport and more importantly, inform the moves that we can make to reduce them.
“We have been monitoring instrumented mouthguard technology for some time, and rapid advances in the sensitivity can now make it possible to distinguish between a head impact, a jump or shouting for example, which is important to the integrity of the research.”
Prevent Biometrics CEO Mike Shogren added: “Prevent Biometrics is honoured to be selected as the head impact monitoring system for this landmark study. Prevent’s patented system has been independently validated by leaders in head impact research across a number of sports for its accuracy and for the quality of its data. Prevent has also focused on making the system easy to use and manage, with top fitting and comfortable mouthguards. Accurate and usable data is critical to helping sports governing bodies like World Rugby drive decisions to advance the welfare of players and to demonstrate how head impact monitoring can be used more broadly in rugby.”
