Football equipment just got smarter

Armchair football fans view clear evidence that technology is influencing their favorite sport. They watch as TV networks mark first downs with computer-generated yellow lines and scroll instant game scores and myriad other statistics across the top and bottom of their screens.

But more and more, technology is also influencing what's happening on the field among players and coaches. Two new technologies aimed at making the sport safer for athletes, and a play-calling computer that could give a coach a winning edge, are just three examples of how high-tech devices may spread throughout the game in coming years.

In the early 1990s, Rick Greenwald was in Park City, Utah, trying to figure out how to help the United States freestyle aerial ski team prevent head injuries. "They were hitting their heads quite frequently and getting hurt," he recalls. He wanted to determine just how hard they were getting hit, but the impact sensors of the day were too big to be put inside their protective helmets.

By 2000, the technology had changed. He and his partner, Joseph (Trey) Crisco, director of the bioengineering laboratory at Brown University in Providence, R.I., developed the HIT (Head Impact Telemetry) System, based on tiny sensors made by Analog Devices. Six miniature air bags inside a helmet record how often, how hard, and where the helmet has been hit.

Today his company, Simbex Inc. of Lebanon, N.H., partners with sporting-goodsmaker Riddell to offer the safety system (price: about $60,000 for helmets, hardware, and software) to football teams. First used in 2003 by Virginia Tech University, the HIT System has also been employed by North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona State, Dartmouth, and Indiana, as well as at several high schools.

While the high-tech helmets can't diagnose a head injury, which must be left to a doctor or trainer, they do send signals to a sideline computer, which keeps track of the number of hits and their severity. The computer also alerts a coach or trainer if the helmet has been struck especially violently.

Head injuries in football, Mr. Greenwald says, are "underreported primarily because you have athletes walking around not wanting to admit they've been hurt, and head injury is not one you can see easily."

Simbex maintains a national database that has recorded some 250,000 head impacts on more than 350 players. By keeping cumulative data on helmet hits, Greenwald hopes to find new insights that someday could lead to modified rules and coaching techniques, as well as better equipment.

Simbex is also engaged in research projects on how the HIT system could be used to study head impacts in other sports, including hockey, children's soccer, boxing, horseback riding, and lacrosse. A contract with the Air Force is testing the system inside the same combat helmet currently used in Iraq.

Another player hazard involves intensive drills conducted during hot weather, which can quietly lead to serious overheating. In one of the most high-profile cases, Korey Stringer, a lineman for the Minnesota Vikings, died in 2001 after a practice when, unbeknownst to coaches and trainers, his core body temperature had reached 108 degrees F.

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