Rugby World Cup<\/a>, which begins next week, before being rolled out across the men\u2019s and women\u2019s elite game.<\/p>\n\u201cMatch officials and players will be able to see that this player has sustained a big head impact because their mouth guard is flashing red,\u201d said Starling. \u201cAnd it will create awareness about head injuries and concussions in the stands and for fans at home, being able to see it on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr Eanna Falvey, World Rugby\u2019s chief medical officer, said every player at the Women\u2019s World Cup will wear the new mouthguards \u2013 apart from two players who wear braces \u2013 a significantly higher proportion than the 85 per cent of players in the men\u2019s game who wear smart mouthguards.<\/p>\n
Falvey said he hopes all players will embrace the new technology. \u201cIt would be great for the game, but personal choice is an important thing, autonomy is an important thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mouthguards work by measuring how much a player\u2019s head moves up and down and rotates during a collision. When it registers an acceleration above 75g and 4,500 radians per second squared for men or 65gs and 4,500 rad\/s2 for women it will start flashing.<\/p>\n
This is an improvement on the current system, which uses Bluetooth to alert the match day doctor and can take several seconds to arrive.<\/p>\n
Starling said the mouthguards could also help identify foul play, but added there were caveats.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a world in which the data from the mouthguard can start to come into play a little bit more with foul play, but what everybody needs to understand that in the same way a player can get concussed from a pretty small head impact, foul play [can have occurred] without registering anything substantial,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we need to be careful not to do is over-rely on the data or put too much power in the hands of the data. Data is incredibly powerful, but in this case the data might not tell 100 per cent of the picture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Starling said broadcasters had asked World Rugby if they could show the g-forces of big tackles during matches. That request was turned down, but she indicated the position may change over time. \u201cIt\u2019s classified as medical data about a player, and so therefore we can\u2019t share those numbers anywhere,\u201d said Starling. \u201cBut we\u2019re working with the players to get them on board to want to share that information.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a very fine line between big and being safe and correct and the player being looked after. Because big isn\u2019t always good, sometimes it\u2019s bad.\u201d \u2013 Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rugby is to introduce flashing LED mouthguards that light up when a player suffers a significant head impact…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,15131,85],"class_list":["post-60871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-rugby-world-cup","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}