English rugby trialling anti-concussion mouthguards
EVERY elite male and female rugby union player in England will be offered the chance to wear a “smart” mouthguard next season as the sport tries to reduce concussions.
As part of a £2.5m ($4.39m) action plan launched by the RFU last year to “make the game safer for future, current and retired players”, the mouthguard will be available to all England, Gallagher Premiership and women’s Allianz Premier 15s players for the 2022-23 campaign.
The mouthguard is able to measure head impacts from tackles via embedded sensors.
The devices, which are charged wirelessly, can quantify the magnitude of a hit and how much a player’s skull accelerates in contact.
They provide real-time data that can be analysed on the sidelines, so are seen as a game-changing way to track, report and reduce concussive blows to the head suffered in training and matches.
“The rollout of instrumented mouthguards to topflight men’s and women’s leagues and international teams will add significantly to our understanding of the number and magnitude of head impacts and accelerations, and how these can be reduced in both training and match settings,” RFU medical services director Simon Kemp said.
The Premiership and Premier 15s will continue saliva testing, too, which helps with concussion detection.
These moves come as it was revealed that concussions in elite English rugby reached their highest rate during the 2020-21 season.
The Professional Rugby Injury Surveillance Project report, produced since 2002, said that for the 10th consecutive season concussion was the most reported injury, contributing to 28 per cent of all match injuries in the elite game – up from 21 per cent in 2019-20.
Other injuries happened less frequently, but 13 per cent of players in the men’s game sustained at least one head injury in a match.