Nov 4, 2022

November 3, 2022 Prevent Biometrics has released a 2.0 version of its sensor-embedded mouthguard to monitor head impacts that’s 60% smaller than the incumbent product. The product launch comes as Prevent Biometrics is providing its smart mouthguards to women’s national team rugby players during the ongoing World Cup in New Zealand. “It's always going to be about making it smaller because it's more wearable,” Prevent Biometrics CEO Mike Shogren tells SportTechie. “The more you make it non-intrusive into a mouthguard the more people are going to say it fits great and they won't complain about its size or bulkiness.” The smaller device is intended to expand Prevent’s acceptance in sports such as soccer and basketball, in which players are less accustomed to wearing mouthguards compared to football and rugby. Prevent’s new sensor board that fits into a mouthguard has been tested at the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab . “We've been testing the 2.0 design of where the sensors are for the last 18 months,” Shogren says. “We still use a gyroscope and an accelerometer to measure the head impact. We have proximity sensors and other devices to help us with the overall reading. All those things are, are the same. It's just different math slightly to have them all together, as opposed to one on each side.” The new sensor board that fits into a mouthguard has been tested at the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab. Shogren referred to how NBA and NFL players typically wear mouthguards so thin that they look like "Invisalign retainers." With Prevent's new, thinner design, Shogren thinks the new device will be able to appeal to those players because it fits with their preferred style while also still able to track impacts. Prevent Biometrics is conducting head impact monitoring studies across youth and professional rugby players through distribution deals with World Rugby, the Rugby Football Union, Super League Europe, and the Rugby Football League. “With this new device, we'll be able to do really thin mouthguards for soccer players,” Shogren says. “World Rugby has said they would not want us to have this thin of mouthguard, it's too thin for what they think their players want. But if you watch LeBron James, or you watched any of the quarterbacks in the NFL, they literally have an Invisalign retainer, that little thin piece of plastic. So we'll be able to do whatever the team wants.” Prevent’s mouthguards transmit real-time data on head impacts, calculating the g-force of each hit and location of each impact through the company’s app that coaches monitor on the sidelines. Shogren says that almost all women’s national teams in the Rugby World Cup currently wear Prevent’s mouthguards, but the Australia and New Zealand teams elected to opt out of wearing them. “There's been a couple of situations where our data has shown someone did not get hit in the head when the video thought they might have,” Shogren say of Prevent’s World Cup use. “The idea of matching large impacts off our device to after the game assessments is a really powerful evolution by World Rugby, to be moving that direction.” Prevent’s other clients include the United States Department of Defense and as well as youth football leagues in Minnesota and Indiana . The company sells directly to teams and leagues rather than on an individual athlete basis, and its current price point varies. “We've always had a goal of less than $100 at the end game,” Shogren says. “Where the price ends up will be market contained and will be influenced by sponsors and how leagues decide to pay for this. But as we've proven to our partners, we've been lowering the price every year as we go. And our goal is to keep doing that.” The NFL currently equips players with sensor-embedded mouthguards made by Biocore as part of head impact studies that were expanded to college football programs last year. Another aspect of Prevent’s 2.0 device is to make the mouthguard more durable for football players. Not that the existing product has trouble sustaining hits, but that football players have a knack taking the device off during games. “Football players when they take their mouthguard out they jam it in their helmet,” Shogren says. “And then when they pull it out their helmet, they can tear the front of the mouthguard. That's one big piece of damage that we see in football. We don't see it at all in rugby, because they wear their mouthguards the whole time. There's no helmet to stick it in.” Photo credits: Courtesy of Prevent Biometrics Latest