TechKnow Q&A: Kyle Hill on how science could help make football safer

TechKnow: Tell us about your most recent story for “TechKnow.”
Kyle Hill: The game of football has a concussion problem and what I did in my segment was to look at different technologies to help both reduce, track, and hopefully diagnose concussions.

TK: Where did you travel for the piece?
KH: I went both to the University of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., to look at helmet technology—putting accelerometers in helmets and tracking how the helmet actually moves during hits, how much acceleration or deceleration it experiences. That's an important part in concussions. Then, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I looked at an actual EEG cap that reads your brainwaves. That was hopefully trying to get a picture of what a concussion looks like in the brain, to bring that the sidelines, put it on a player and say, “Yep, you have a concussion”—or not.

TK: What was your takeaway?
KH: There’s way more impacts than we ever thought happening, especially for young players. Seventy percent of the players who play football in the U.S. are young kids. Now that this kind of thing has come to light, we really have to focus on the potential harm that might befall their developing brains. We’re just on the ground floor of this, but it’s really heartening to see that big universities that can afford to do this research are actually doing it very actively.

TK: Is there such a thing as a safe way to play football?
KH: I don’t know if you’ll ever eliminate concussions from football—it’s kind of how the game is played. Hitting other people is kind of the way it's played. But what you can do is change the rules a little bit to help prevent concussions. So the NFL itself has pushed forward where you kick off from to hopefully get less people running at each other. It goes right out of the end zone and you can’t take it back, so there’s less hits, and we do see a reduction in the number of concussions. Thanks to the research, at least a little bit, even youth teams and college teams are reducing the amounts of hits that they’re doing during practice. They’re scheduling certain types of drills at different times to reduce the number of hits. Hopefully, that will only get better—but it’s part of the game, unfortunately. All we can do is try our best to keep them safe.

TK: How did it feel to shoot a story in the midst of a massive college football game?
KH: I was at the Cornhuskers homecoming game with 92,000 people screaming around me. It was electric and interactive. I got to see the game with a player who had to leave football, someone who might have gone to the NFL, but after taking four concussions he decided to take himself out of the game. It was really interesting to see that from his perspective, and ultimately he told me that he didn’t regret his decision at all and he can still enjoy football. Now he goes around the country talking to kids about staying safe. That was really important for me to see.

TK: Were you at field level?
KH: Yeah, we were right on the sidelines. The first drive for the Cornhuskers we actually had a pair of guys get tackled maybe two feet in front of me. You see all the cameras flashing. It was really amazing—and it was deafening. It was really, really cool. I’ve never been that close to something so… It’s just, football is everything out there. It’s just the heart of that town. To see them all come together under one thing and to know that the university is actually trying to keep these kids safe with research—they’re putting millions of dollars into the lab that I saw, the testing that I went through. Seeing both of them come together was really the highlight of everything that I got to see.

TK: You got hooked up to a pretty intense contraption for this story. Tell us about how that worked.
An EEG—an electroencephalogram—measures brain waves that are coming out from your brain onto your scalp, and it picks up those electrical signals, which is cool in and of itself. But why it’s important for football is we have to first establish what your brain looks like normally. Then, after there’s an injury, you test again. If there’s a significant difference between the baseline and what you have now, you might have had some kind of brain injury. To do that, they put this “science octopus,” as I call it, on your head, 256 of these suction cup things. Then they ask you a certain kind of question and the question is really hard. They just flash letters in sequence, and then they go away. If the letter that you see is the same as two letters before it, you hit “match,” and if it’s not, you hit “non-match.” You do that for like 120 letters in succession. You’ll see me just focusing really hard on getting this test right because even if you blink, just blinking sends a shockwave through your brain patterns and they pick up your blinking, so you’re not supposed to blink as much as possible. So you’re sitting there like, “Oh god, was that A or was that B?” It was really intense. To imagine someone who possibly had a brain injury on the sidelines of a football game taking this same test—you could see where there’d be a discrepancy. The lynchpin of this is trying to get the analysis time down to like five minutes. Take a player off the field, five minute test, see what happens. And I was a part of that.

TK: How do you personally feel about football?
KH: Coming from Wisconsin, I am a huge football fan. I’m a Packers fan and they’re the cheese-heads. You go to Nebraska, and they’re the corn-heads, they have these big ears of corn on their heads. Everyone thinks it’s ridiculous—unless you’re from someplace like where I’m from where you put big slices of cheese on your head. So, I’m a huge football fan, but I don’t think I’d play football. Not because I’m not very athletic, which I’m not, but the danger is just so much. I love the game, and if we can make it safer, all the better. But I don’t think I would play.

TK: Have you watched a game since this shoot? How does it impact your enjoyment of the sport?
Especially having just done this, watching any football game I’m immediately aware of the hits. Whenever I see someone take a big hit, it’s different for me. You hear the players saying, “Yeah, kill that guy! Good hit!” But now when I see these things, I’m just like. “Ooh, that was probably a brain injury.” It’s hard for me to watch. You still get pumped up, but also you think, “He could have problems later in life getting around his own house.” I don’t think I’ll watch a football game really the same way anymore.