Data from hi-tech mouthguards can help to future-proof rugby union from top to bottom, World Rugby’s chief medical officer, Éanna Falvey, has told the Guardian.
On Monday the sport’s governing body confirmed that it would start using smart mouthguards – which track the G-force of every head impact in real time – to improve player safety in elite matches.
It will mean that when a male player experiences an impact above 70g and 4000 radians per second squared, he will automatically be withdrawn from the pitch and subject to a head injury assessment. For women, who will first utilise the new technology this weekend in the WXV, the threshold is 55g and 4,000 rad/s².
But Falvey forecast that the £250 technology, which uses Bluetooth to alert a doctor when the threshold is breached, would eventually be used in junior and community rugby to make the game safer. That is a pressing consideration given the number of children taking up the sport has fallen sharply, with parents worried about the risk of a potential brain injury.
“We know from a study of community players in Otago that the impacts are much smaller, and far less frequent in the under-13 and under-15 and under-18 level of the game,” Falvey said. “But we would like to work towards a scenario where we had certain thresholds, and these technologies, for the community game too.”
Falvey added that World Rugby’s decision to set a minimum set of standards for smart mouthguards would help drive competition to bring prices down. “We’ll make this affordable,” he said. “And we will see this make its way into the community setting in the future.”
Meanwhile in the elite game, World Rugby is planning to use the mouthguards to better examine what Falvey calls the “chronic load piece”.
Falvey said that the initial data showed that 35% of the head acceleration events during a week occur in training, while the rest happen in match situations. The hope is that by further examining the forces a player faces over the course of a season and career, it will ultimately lead to changes that make the game safer.
“We met with a group of experts in Boston in June, and all eight of the speakers said to us: ‘Look to lower the number of head impact events that occur in your game.’ They told us: ‘Concussions are important but lowering the number of head impact events is the area that you need to focus on.’”
Falvey admitted that World Rugby was also keen to closely monitor players who made a high number of tackles in a game. “They’re the people we want to manage appropriately,” he said. “What we want to do is to look at somebody who hasn’t necessarily had a concussion, but has had quite a number of head impact events, and so we manage them differently.”
World Rugby believes that one day there could even be individualised head injury assessments for players for their return to play process. “Like in any other area of medicine, the goal is always to individualise what we do,” Falvey said.
World Rugby has also recommended that players at all levels of the sport wear a mouthguard. That is based on research in ice hockey which found it protects against dental injuries and can reduce the risk of a concussion by 20%.
