The Sports Legacy Institute, a leading concussion awareness and research center affiliated with Boston University, will cease taking payments to license its name to helmet sensor companies following criticism the group was profiting off the concussion issue.
Chris Nowinski, SLI’s founding executive director, said that such profiting was never the case and that, instead, the choice to discontinue charging sensor companies was because many of them could not afford the fees.
“From what I have learned, when you develop standards in a new industry, it is difficult, it is competitive, and you are often dealing with companies with shoestring budgets,” Nowinski said. “Then there was the appearance of the conflict-of-interest concern. We wanted to remove the conflict [issue].”
SLI has begun disbanding its incorporated affiliate, the Smarter Sports Association, which housed the licensing company. But SLI will continue to build a database to determine historical norms for the number of hits a player receives over a given period, Nowinski said.
Sensors first came on the market four years ago and were held out frequently as a major tool in fighting concussions for the ability to track the number of hits players took and the force of those hits. Last month, though, the NFL, which once expected it could deploy sensors across all its teams in 2015, discontinued its sensor-testing program after declaring the devices unreliable. An adviser to the NFL’s health and safety committee, BU’s Dr. Robert Cantu, is also the medical director of SLI.
Nowinski unveiled ambitious plans at the 2014 Super Bowl to derive a measure to determine the maximum number of hits to the head a player could sustain before it could be decided that the player should be taken out of a game. The SLI-branded effort is called Hit Count, and SLI has licensed the brand to three sensor companies that passed a certification test. The license fee is $25,000, and the idea is for the sensor companies to place the brand on their product.
Another reason Nowinski cited that SLI isn’t certifying sensors now: Virginia Tech, which already rates football helmets (and shortly will do so for hockey helmets), is planning a system for impact sensors. The plan is to have that five-star rating system available in a year, said Stefan Duma, the Virginia Tech professor who manages the star-rating program. Duma promised the school would take no money from sensor companies. The funding for that program, which will total about half a million dollars, is coming from the foundation of a Virginia Tech graduate, Duma said.
