MAKING AN IMPACT
Texas Tech engineering student Berto Garcia fights to combat concussions in football
Texas Tech student doing his part to reduce concussions in football
LUBBOCK, Texas — Berto Garcia, a computer engineering major at Texas Tech, would like to save the game of football from itself. He is 21 years old, and keeps his Kawasaki Ninja ZX10R motorcycle leaning on a kickstand in the driveway. A “Rock Star” sticker is on the right side of the bike, and he mentions a recent trip back from Austin, where he saw a J. Cole concert with an old football teammate, when he revved it up to 150 mph. He moves much slower now, walking past the bike to pull open a side door to his single-story, amber-brick house off campus, and continues into a darkened room. On one wall is a “Rocky” movie poster; a Styrofoam cup from Spanky’s, a burger-and-beer hangout, rests on a windowsill. The kitchen is down the hall to the left and well lit. It is his converted makerspace. He stores a tool kit on the top shelf. Pliers, wrenches, screwdrivers and a soldering iron line the wall. A board is affixed over the desk. The silhouette of a human head is painted on the wood. Inside, the outline of a brain is visible. There is a warning that goes with the image: ATTENTION DO NOT READ MINDS WITHOUT PERMISSION An IV pole donated by a hospital stands in the corner. On a hook hangs a black football helmet replete with a glossy exterior, three-bar facemask, cushioned interior and chinstrap. Garcia, a former high school player who gave the game up after suffering a concussion, grabs the headgear. It is a prototype for a project now five years in the making. No longer a combatant, he remains captivated by football’s Newtonian chaos, and points to three sockets that he built into the helmet. One is on the back and one is by each earhole. Inside the helmet is a microcontroller programmed to read force sensory data. Next to the helmet is a pair of shoulder pads. Three short poles stick up from the pads and are topped by plastic balls. They fit into the helmet sockets. Once connected, it is a ball-and-socket system that weighs five pounds. When a hit to the helmet occurs, the microcontroller in the helmet sends a signal to a microcontroller in the pads to activate pneumatics in order to stabilize the head immediately. Garcia believes it can reduce concussions by reining in whiplashes that strain neck muscles and rattle brains following collisions.
“I knew that if I was going to try to reduce concussions, I had to stop linear forces, as well as rotational forces,” Garcia says. “I was going to have to have an exoskeleton around the neck to be able to disperse all that energy away from the head and neck so that all of those forces don’t go right into your spinal cord, into your brain. They go straight into those stabilizers around the neck and head.”
As football grows ever more violent, Garcia’s focus is on the forces at play. Equipment standards are being questioned in light of the concussion crisis, and a growing chorus is calling for helmets and pads to be shelved so that flag football can become the preferred form of the game. At the same time, sensor technology is advancing; helmet designs are being reconsidered. Garcia holds a unique position in football’s future while current players incur head traumas and retirees battle brain disease. A junior at Tech, he possesses an entrepreneurial spirit, and continues to invent as he tracks football’s evolution. He collects data from tests that include firing projectiles from an air cannon to his helmet, and he keeps tabs on the number of teens who perish on the football field. While inspired by sports, his work has drawn interest from unexpected corners. In 2015, the Office of Naval Research gave him a $10,000 scholarship to pay for his curiosity’s growing costs. It was a boon for a student scientist who had initially financed his efforts by selling burritos at a West Texas truck stop to raise funds for his high school’s science fair team.
“When I began, I started buying all these things online,” he says. “Kind of blindly, with my eyes closed, but I have this, how can I say, I guess I could call it a skill that anything I envision, that I want to make, I can already see how it’s going to look like in the final product.”
Researchers continue to find troubling returns regarding football’s status quo. Garcia gauges how many G-forces players absorb during a hit. Seventy or more Gs are considered to be the cause of a concussion. Light-emitting diodes are wired inside Garcia’s helmet. They flash green above the facemask if the force is below 70 Gs. They flash red when it is more than 70. Garcia charts the numbers. In his wake are coding sessions, fundraising drives and long-term research that led him from West Texas to Pittsburgh for an international fair to filing a patent application. He knows Bill Gates