VR Eye Tracking System Developed for Athletes To Determine If They're Prone to Injury

When she first began to check her athletes with a product from NeuroSync, Chelsea Lane was the head performance therapist with the Golden State Warriors.

NeurosSync, as described in a report from The Verge, is a neurotechnology firm making a tool that tracks eye movements to understand brain health.

At first, Lane initially used it as part of the concussion protocols of the team. However, when she moved to the Atlanta Hawks in 2018, she began to use the information in another way to attempt and understand how well athletes slept.

Lane, now the head of high performance at Basketball New Zealand, said she had some freedom to explore the idea that, while it is not the intended purpose, she might have technology in her hands that could help her better understand and manage fatigue in her overworked and underslept population by tracking the function of their eye.

Using VR Eye-Tracking System

Now, NeurSync, then called SyncThink, is launching a platform called Pro-Sync that's formalizing some of its strategies of Lane.

The new technology utilizes the VR eye tracking system of the firm to provide athletes with a score on their overall cognitive performance, as well as an indicator of whether or not they are fatigued. Eye-tracking system, in general, is explained in a ScienceDirect report.

Some others in the field are undoubtful, although Scott Anderson, the company's chief clinical officer, says it is a way to flag athletes who could get hurt.

This platform of Neurosync is based on a wireless virtual reality headset that people wear to go through its various analyses.

Sensors in the headset detect eye movement as the user completes tasks. The system's software also sends information to providers through an Android tablet.

The new platform is not being sold as a medical device; thus, it has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and has not been tested in formal clinical trials. Therefore, there are no published data on how well it's working.

Technology for Injury Prevention

This technology was used by various sports teams at the professional and college level, including Stanford University and Golden State Warriors, where Jamshid Ghajar, the company founder, is the director of the Brain Performance Center.

The said teams used it as part of concussion protocols. That's when they began to see that the technology could be employed as a measure of brain performance beyond injury, explained Anderson.

There was a real interest in anything, generally, outside of traumatic brain injury that people wanted to use the product for.

Nonetheless, regardless of potential pushback within neuroscientific communities, such products still tend to get traction in fields such as sports science and sports.

Vulnerability to Brain Injury

People who generally work with people who are vulnerable to brain injury are searching for objective measures, explained Samadani.

There are not many ways of assessing brain health, so people are willing to try things, even if they have not been officially tested and verified for a specific purpose.

That is the reason Anderson thinks there is an appeal, too. There is not a solution out there that's giving clear data around prevention of injury and performance; he continued explaining.

Related information about eye-tracking technology is shown on Tech in 5 Minutes' YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Virtual Reality in Science Times.