DT Project – Concussion in Youth Sports: Final Blog Post

For this post we are using the design thinking process to come up with ways to help concussions in youth sports. Please enjoy my thinking process. To get a better understanding I will give you background to concussions in my empathize section, give you specifics of what were looking in to in my define section, I will show you my brainstorm in my ideate section, I will give you my reasoning and ideas in the prototype stage, and lastly, I will show you have my group and I tested our invention and our plans for the future.

Empathize:

A concussion is a traumatic brain injury that can occur from many different causes. It could happen if someone gets hit in the head, falls down, or gets a strong object to the head. When someone gets a concussion, there are normally no physical signs needed to be seen to have a concussion present. Sometimes one can pass out or become unconscious after getting hit that can lead to a concussion. Concussions often happen in sports, but can be seen after accidents, fights, or even from physical activity. To learn more about concussions, check out this video.

Concussions happen when the fluid around your brain is hit hard and cannot protect the brain. This mean the brain can crash against the skull and bruise, causing damage to the brain and the person’s daily life. There are many types of scenarios that this can occur, such as; fights, falls, playground injuries, car crashes, bike accidents, and mainly, in sports. Everyone can get concussions and can get them thought their life, and even their day. The most common people to get concussions are athletes because of their busy and active lifestyle.

this is me kelli johnson playing sports. photo taken by my mother julie johnson.

Concussions have doubled in the past 10 years and it has been shown that kids ages 8-13 most at risk for receiving concussions. When one gets a concussion, it increases neurologic disability 39% and is shown to slow down the brains ability to work as the number of concussions in a person increases. According to head case company 3,800,000 Concussions were reported in high school athletics in 2012. Concussions are one of the most dangerous injuries because they can be unpredictable, yet they are one of the most common injuries. Concussions can be found after one is hit hard in the head and can be identified from an hour to a month after the incident occurs. Sometimes, one can’t remember things or they wont be able to think clearly. They can experience the feeling of slow thinking, nausea and or vomiting, vision problems that can lead to dizziness or not seeing clearly, balance or walking problems, and even mood swings.

sports equipment by kelli johnson

When someone gets a concussion they must rest the brain, not participate in high intensity activity, try to reduce mental concentration, take breaks during the day, cut down on hours outside of the house, allowed to use pain reliever when the headaches happen and most importantly, no sports. To prevent concussions one must play by the rules, and wear protective gear. This is when we decided to look more into the use and importance of protective gear.

this is me wearing protective gear. photo by julie johnson

Define:

We realized that it is very important to stress wearing protective gear because most athletes do not realize the important of wearing protective gear. Also, many athletes forget to wear protective gear. Protective gear is worn in almost every sport and is very important in the prevention of concussions. After doing extensive research on concussions, and specifically in youth sports, we wanted to see how we could prevent concussions. We saw that the percentage of youth athletes that are affected are high and a main reason for this is because of their protective gear. Not only does protective gear reduce injury, it prevents concussions. There has been 3.5 million kids alone in the past couple years that have gotten concussion because of a protective gear absence. Because of this, we found out that this was something we can help kids remember to bring and hopefully change.

picture of protective gear. by kelli johnson

Ideate:

Below was our brainstorming process. From the research above we decided that concussions sometimes are inevitable and happen for many different reasons. Below is our brainstorming process on how we can help young people, like us, prevent concussions and hopefully reduce the high numbers of concussions in youth. What we decided to focus on is in red.

our thinking process. shown in poplet made by kelli johnson.

Prototype:

As you can see above, concussions can happen for many different reasons. We decided to focus on a reason that could be fixed rather than car accidents or people falling down. We decided to focus on protective gear not being worn, forgotten, or not being used. Because protective gear can be looked as funny or weird to wear during sports, some kids choose not to wear them. Because this is a thing we can fix and help raise awareness by we decided to create a sports bag with a checklist that keeps track of your protective gear. This list will have different drop down sections that will have different check boxes for the different sports one might play. For example, it will have a basketball menu that has shoes, braces, mouth gear, tape, and even compression shorts to check off to make sure you have before leaving for a game or practice. Once the gear is put it your bag it is checked off on this list and therefore you know it is in your bag so there is no excuses on wearing it. Our goal is that it increases the amount of protective gear worn and also increase the consistency of wearing it.

bag with scanner. picture by kelli johnson

bag with scanner. picture by kelli johnson

Test:

We decided to make a check-list app that kids put on their sports bag to make sure that they do not forget their protective gear. The goal of this scanner is so they can remember to bring their gear, wear it during practices, games, and in essence, prevent concussions. This app will have a pull down menu of different sports people play.

sports pull down menu

Once the child chooses the sport they are going to play, he or she clicks on the sport and a list will come up with all the protective gear needed to wear during the sport. As you can see, the list that is shown below, baseball is the sport menu shown below.

pull down baseball menu.

With our checklist, athletes will no longer forget the gear they need to wear for the sport they are going to play. First, we talked to my brother Derek Johnson and his seventh grade friends to see if this was something they would find helpful. Below is a video of my brother Derek’s response on the idea of the checklist of protective gear going on his sports bag.

We then wanted to open it up to a greater population and created a survey to see what others thought of the checklist. The results were unanimous in the fact that people thought it would be very useful. Because of all this positive feedback we received, we decided to test the checklist to see how helpful it would actually be.

Our target age was seventh grade boys. We chose this age group because it is my brother’s age and this is when most boys play multiple sports. This is also when most boys begin to pack their own activity bags and often forget the needed material and protective gear. We had two boys participate in our experiment, Derek and John.

John was able to use the checklist when packing for a baseball practice, and Derek was not. We put all the gear in the spots Derek and John keep their gear in the garage and let them pack the bag for 5 minuets. After the 5 minutes we checked the bag to see if all the gear in the picture below was accounted for.

derek packing bag. picture by kelli johnson

With those five minutes Derek forgot his wrist brace, ankle brace, and shin guard. Where John did not forget anything and had all the checks marked off. Based off of this experienced we believe that this will be a successful invention that will help and increase the use of protective gear in young and old athletes. Our hopes for the future would be to develop this into a scanner and have each item have its own barcode that the scanner recognizes, and then checks off. We hope this will encourage and increase the use of protective gear, thus minimizing the sports related concussions in youth.