Concussion 360

What is Concussion 360

Concussion 360 is a functionality that I designed as part of Performance Medicine to track concussions, monitor baseline statuses, and provide an overview of all concussions in a squad or roster.

Concussions are becoming more and more of a problem in sports and are getting a lot of attention in the media. As a result, a number of our customers were looking for a single tool to track and monitor concussions in their teams.

This involved an iPad app to allow concussion tests to be carried out as well as a web side to allow them to view test results, track progression, and ensure baseline tests for comparison are kept up to date

Why

When managing a full roster of up to 100 athletes in NFL and many more in college sports it can be difficult to keep track of all of the assessments athletes need to complete as well as their expiry dates. Allowing practitioners to quickly visualise which assessments are coming up on their expiry dates and which athletes have open concussions gives them peace of mind that they’re not missing data or letting athlete care drop like has happened previously.

How

Since concussion is such a big topic for doctors in sports we had a lot of access to doctors and other practitioners throughout the design of this area. In particular we had recurring calls with the Pac-12, NFL, IRFU, and RFU on this area meaning we not only got to carry out research interviews with them but we also got to test early in the process with end users.

As is standard of performance medicine, there were three aspects of concussion, the roster/squad level, the athlete level, and the injury level.

Roster/squad level

At this level we needed to surface information which in the past has gone unnoticed. As our users told us, there’s no point in collecting the information if they can’t see it. Here they told us they wanted to see what they needed to action, assessments outstanding, expiring or recently expired and open concussions that they need to check in on.

Athlete level

At the athlete level practitioners wanted to see more of a mix of information, the items they needed to action like active concussions and baselines but also the full concussion history of that athlete, eg a list of all concussions they had suffered with the length of time it took them to recover, and all tests they had completed, whether a concussion was detected or not. This would allow the practitioner to gain a full picture of the athlete’s concussion history as the treatment would differ depending on whether they had a history of multiple concussions.

Injury level

One of the main issues doctors mentioned when we spoke to them about was being able to compare SCAT results over time to see how the athlete’s symptoms were progressing. The SCAT providers they were using would export a PDF of each assessments results and they would have to download each one from their EMR and manually compare the results. Again the issue was easily seeing the information they had collected.

In order to have the SCAT data to display within performance medicine we designed a flow to allow the practitioners to complete the assessment in our iPad app Kiosk. As we had the data coming through from our own app we were able to display it in whatever way worked best for the users giving us the ability to design how the results were displayed without too many technical limitations. We tried and tested multiple variations with different practitioners from different orgs and governing bodies to get to our final design with the assessments on the X axis and the details on the Y axis, accordions for hiding and showing symptoms, red text and background for symptoms above baseline, and orange text and background for symptoms which were previously above baseline and have since returned to baseline or below.