iPhone App Detects Possible Concussions

Out of Kansas has come an app on an iPod or iPhone that can instantly help detect a possible concussion. Roy Wenzl, writing for the Wichita Eagle, reports that inventor Chase Curtiss, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has received FDA approval for the app called SWAY Balance.

Curtis explains that his app does not diagnose concussions, as such, but measures balance as a significant symptom of a possible head injury. The trainer testing an athlete for possible injury instructs him or her to hold the iPhone or iPad containing the app against the chest. Then she instructs him to take a brief test. The athlete is told to, with eyes closed, put his feet together and then move the dominant foot in front of the other, heel to toe. The athlete then is to lift the dominant foot and stand on the non-dominant foot. The app gives an immediate reading, by numbers, as to whether an athlete has developed a problem with balance.

Before gaining approval, Curtiss tested his app for two years at Wichita State University (WSU) and among hundreds of athletes at Wichita East and Andover Central high schools, as well as in schools in Oklahoma and California.

Jennifer Hudson, the head athletic trainer for the Wichita school district who helped test the app with East High athletes calls it a “very cool tool.” Jeremy Patterson, a staff member at WSU who was involved in studying and testing the app, said it is an inexpensive tool that can gather evidence in a matter of minutes indicating if an athlete may have suffered a concussion. What Curtiss did, said Patterson, was develop a cheap, fast, accurate tool that trainers and other health care specialists have never had before. It gathers measurable evidence in moments, indicating whether or not a person has probably suffered a concussion.

Ideally, athletes will be tested at the beginning of a season, when they are healthy and un-injured, Wenzl noted. That gives the trainer a recorded baseline of how much balance the athlete has when healthy. That baseline can then be compared with whatever the app shows if the athlete is injured in a practice or competition.

Wenzl quoted Hudson, who teaches in the athletic training program at WSU, as saying, “A lot of the initial assessments by trainers on the sidelines have had to be much more subjective, much of them based on how the athlete is feeling, ” she said. “A concussion until now has not necessarily been an injury that you can see, like a swollen ankle. But this app shows real numbers and gives you a better assessment.”

She added that the app does not “prove” a person has a concussion because some concussions don’t affect the area of the brain that controls balance. But it gives a better assessment than she’s seen before.