Collision Prediction and Prevention in Contact Sports Using RFID Tags and Haptic Feedback

American football is a leading sport for contact-related injuries such as cervical spine injuries, some of which result from an unforeseen hit. The use of a feedback mechanism to alert an athlete of a potential hit may mitigate the risk for sport-related concussion and catastrophic injury by allowing athletes to effectively brace for an otherwise unforeseen impact. In this project, we created a proximity sensor system using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to send haptic feedback to the wearer before a potential impact. Our pilot test consisted of three participants who wore our novel sensor system, who ran simulated routes to represent player-to-player contact. Additionally, we used simulated data from a Network Live Football (NFL) league game to further validate our contact prediction algorithm. Results show that our method can predict players' collisions with less than 14% false-alarms.