Head health gets assist from new app
Wellwood-backed HeadCheck to partner with BCHL this season to monitor concussions
A year ago, a new medical app caught Kyle Wellwood’s eye. Young hockey players, he knew, could really benefit from the new technology.
Less than a year later, that app is now going to be used by an entire league.
HeadCheck, an app that allows users to track potential head injuries, is going to be in the hands of medical staff for every team in the B.C. Hockey League, the province’s junior A circuit.
Concussion awareness has “come a long way,” Wellwood said this week. The former NHLer, who played for the Maple Leafs, Sharks, Jets and Canucks, said he never had a concussion in his career, but also knows for much of that time people weren’t knowledgeable.
Wellwood, 34, played five years of junior hockey in Ontario and said he couldn’t remember a single instance where concussions were talked about. He made the jump to pro hockey in 2003. Even then, concussions were rarely mentioned.
He said he was always well cared for by pro hockey medics, but again, “there just wasn’t the knowledge and data.”
But “I think that people seem to know enough now that they want the tool,” he said. And so Wellwood invested a year ago in HeadCheck Health, the company that makes the app.
Harrison Brown, a University of B.C. neurophysiology PhD student and former rugby player behind HeadCheck, said while nothing replaces proper medical assessment, collecting data along the way is something anyone can do.
“There are ways to collect data that is simple for laypeople,” he said. Every player in the BCHL will undergo a baseline assessment by team medical staff over the coming weeks to get an understanding of how players’ brains are currently functioning.
Player data will be kept centrally by the league and any athletic therapist can run tests on any player if there’s a worry during a game. If tests show something’s off from the pre-season testing, he’ll be removed from the game.
“There’s no single test alone to assess concussions,” Brown added. “The gold standard to measure the injury is to look at a number of different functions of the brain,” things like cognition, balance and vision.
Players who have been removed from play won’t be able to return without approval by a doctor.
The whole league is fully on board, BCHL commissioner John Grisdale said.
“We’re colleagues,” Grisdale said of the relationship with HeadCheck. “It’s going to allow our athletic therapists to have instant access to a reliable concussion-assessment tool.”
The league is focused on player welfare and is aware how much more knowledge parents, players and coaches now bring to the table. Having the app available to all now just increases that knowledge base.
“Our job has to continue on the player-safety side,” he said. He also hoped adding HeadCheck would give parents some piece of mind, knowing how seriously teams were taking the brain health of their young charges.
From Wellwood’s perspective, the app will provide clarity to an area of player health that carries so much long-term risk.
“It just takes a lot of pressure off coaches and management,” he said. The data won’t lie. If the player’s brain isn’t right to play, there won’t be any hiding.
And Brown suggested there are other big-picture questions the league will be able to answer, like does playing three games in three days, as teams so often do, promote heightened head-injury risk?
HeadCheck will hand the league monthly data on things like how many tests have been performed and how many concussions have been detected?
Brown and his business partners — including COO Kerry Costello — first started working with individual teams, but the step up to providing services for a whole league was something they’ve planned for all along.
The only challenge now? Hiring enough staff for customer support.
“It’s definitely showing the progress we’ve made as a company,” he said.