With, hopefully, benefits for every level of football — and for other sports.
Crandall sees the engineering roadmap as the correct, well, road to take.
Of note is a focus on sensors that can determine all sorts of data to help enhance safety. The league and the players' union are working to develop novel sensor technology capable of accurately recording the motion of the head during impact in varying game conditions and positions. The plan is for the NFL, when the technology is ready, to offer mouth guards instrumented with such sensors to players to measure their impact response.
"Prevention should always be a focus," Chiarelli says. "Nevertheless, the development of biologically based diagnostics is critical for return-to-play decisions for the NFL, and return to combat/training for the armed forces. Imagine if you had a handheld analyzer that with a single drop could determine whether a player or a soldier had a concussion — and determine the severity of that injury."
With a recent study into brain trauma revealing significant numbers of former NFL players among those examined suffering from CTE, the emphasis on injury prevention of all kinds must be paramount.
"Many fields have transitioned from primarily an experimental evaluation and design of products to a largely computational development program. Computational models that simulate various designs and use conditions can greatly enhance the thoroughness and efficacy of the design process while simultaneously reducing the time of product development."
CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) can cause memory loss, depression, violent mood swings and other cognitive and behavioral issues in those exposed to repetitive head trauma.
"Beyond the particular outcome of the roadmap," he says, "we will develop an improved understanding of the types and severity of impacts players experience on-field through video analysis and sensors that will be available to examine a broader array of medical and engineering questions."
As always in this era of CTE concerns, any sports-oriented medical studies must be all-encompassing. Developing improved tools for research and design is front and center, as the league's scientific advisory board is seeking to be, with significant financial outlay.
The league has embarked on what it calls "The Engineering Roadmap," a $60 million program designed to improve head protection equipment.
A year out from Commissioner Roger Goodell's pledge to "look at anything and everything to protect our players and make the game safer," one of the areas receiving concentrated attention by the league is developing equipment that provides even more specific and enhanced feedback on improving safety in football. Helmets, shoulder pads and other pads,Babe Ruth Jersey, and footwear all have seen improvements,Football jerseys authentic china, but there's much more to be done.

"The NFL has a responsibility to do everything it can to make the game safer and drive research that advances treatment and prevention and, as we make advances, share them with the broader sports world. Most of the issues we face in the NFL are sport issues, and beyond that they are society issues."
That means pushing hard on all fronts,Cheap Rams Jerseys For Sale, particularly equipment innovation and testing.
"A key component of the engineering roadmap is to accurately measure the motion and acceleration the head experiences during play in the NFL by player position, to give design direction for protective equipment," Arbogast says. "To date, we have been doing that via video reconstructions and injury event recreations using crash test dummies. These approaches are incredibly time intensive and, by design, focus on 'events' that must be subjectively selected from game film or injury reports."
The program is managed in collaboration with NFL Players Association's engineering consultants, Dr. Kristy Arbogast, co-scientific director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and Dr. Barry Myers,Cheap Football Jerseys Paypal, director of innovation at Duke University's Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
But "the engineering roadmap leverages the modeling approach used in other fields to apply computational models to helmet design and evaluation," Crandall adds.
"This athlete exposure data will inform the testing of protective equipment so that future helmet test methodologies and design evolution are relevant to what is actually experienced on the field," Arbogast says.
NEW YORK (AP) — A year after the NFL