Thursday, August 11th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00a	When to get your head out of the game Head injuries are a hot topic today in sports medicine, with numerous studies pointing to a high prevalence of sports-related concussions, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, among youth and professional athletes. Now an MIT-invented tool is aiding in detecting and diagnosing concussions, in real-time. In 2007, the American College of Sports Medicine estimated that each year roughly 300,000 high school and college athletes are diagnosed with sports-related head injuries — but that number may be seven times higher, due to undiagnosed cases. One-third of sports-related concussions among college athletes went undiagnosed in a 2013 study by the National Institutes of Health. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has consistently referred to the rise of sports-related head injuries as a national epidemic. Last October, MIT alumnus Ben Harvatine ’12 — who suffered several head injuries as a longtime wrestler — started selling a wearable sensor for athletes, called the Jolt Sensor, that detects and gathers data on head impacts in real-time. Commercialized through Harvatine’s startup Jolt Athletics, the sensor is now being used nationwide by teams from grade-school to college levels, and is being trialed by professional teams. “We’re trying to give parents and coaches another tool to make sure they don’t miss big hits, or maybe catch a hit that doesn’t look that big but measures off the charts,” Harvatine says. Tracking impact The Jolt Sensor is essentially a small, clip-on accelerometer that can be mounted on an athlete’s helmet, or other headgear, to measure any impact an athlete sustains. When the athlete receives a heavy blow, the sensor vibrates and sends alerts to a mobile app, which is monitored by coaches or parents on the sideline. The app lists each player on a team wearing the sensor. Filtered to the top of the list are players that received the biggest hits, players with the most total hits, and players with above average hits compared to their past impacts. If a player sustains a hard hit, the player’s name turns red, and an alert appears telling the coach to evaluate that player. The app includes a concussion symptom checklist and cognitive assessment test. “We can’t be overly diagnostic, but we do our best to communicate the urgency that that was a big hit and you need to check out the player,” Harvatine says. By recording every impact, big or small, the app also creates impact statistics for each athlete. “You can watch how an athlete is trending — day to day, week to week, month to month — in terms of their total impact exposure, and mitigate high risk situations before they result in injury,” Harvatine says. Several other concussion-monitoring sensors are currently available. But a key innovation of the Jolt Sensor, Harvatine says, is a custom communications protocol that allows an unlimited number of sensors to transfer data to the app from up to 200 yards away. “That gives us an unparalleled range,” he says. “You don’t have to chase your kids around the field with your phone to get those alerts. You can actually follow a whole team at once.” Data: The voice of reason Apart from developing the sensors, the startup, headquartered in Boston, is focusing on gathering and analyzing data, which could provide deeper, objective insights into concussions, Harvatine says. Over the years, Harvatine has seen sports-related head injuries become increasingly polarizing in the U.S., especially among parents. Some parents, he says, deny concussions happen so frequently, while others say they’ll never let their kids play sports due to risk. By amassing data, Harvatine hopes Jolt Athletics can offer a scientific middle ground: “We’re trying to be that rational voice, saying, ‘Yes, there are risks in sports, but we can help you better understand that risk and intelligently mitigate it.’” So far, the Jolt Sensor has uncovered a surprising frequency of big hits among kids as young as 10, Harvatine says. “We had a couple sensors that have registered so many hits, at such a high level, that we’ve contacted the owners to make sure we didn’t have a defective sensor,” he says. “Turns out, it’s just typical for that age range.” Although that finding doesn’t come from a large data set, Harvatine has formed a hypothesis for why those young kids take such big hits. “They’re big enough, strong enough, and fast enough to put hard licks on each other, but not necessarily experienced enough that they’re in total control of their bodies,” he says. “That may be making that particular level of play a little more dangerous than the levels just before or just after.” Getting knocked around — for science Harvatine, who studied mechanical engineering at MIT, designed the Jolt Sensor for a class project after a fateful incident: During a practice his junior year for MIT’s wrestling team, he suffered a concussion that went unnoticed. “I was feeling dizzy and nauseous, but I thought I was dehydrated, so I pushed through,” he says. “But by the end of practice, I was having trouble getting up, and I couldn’t pull words together.” Harvatine ended up in the hospital with a months-long recovery that required dropping out of all classes for the fall semester. Upon returning to MIT the following spring, he enrolled in Course 2.671 (Measurement and Instrumentation), where he was charged with using a sensor to collect real-world data. And he had a revelation. “I grabbed a bunch of accelerometers, strapped them to my wrestling headgear, and, much to my parents’ chagrin, went back to the wrestling mat to get knocked around and start gathering data,” he says. In his fraternity house, Harvatine and classmate and Jolt Athletics co-founder Seth Berg ’14 designed the first Jolt Sensor prototype: a data-collection unit strapped around Harvatine’s waist, with wires running from the device, up his back, and connecting to accelerometers on his headgear. Everything had to be connected to a laptop. During open gym hours, Harvatine wrestled with teammates while wearing the prototype — and collected some interesting data. Wrestling moves that generated the biggest blows didn’t involve direct impact to the head, but instead came from snapping his head back and forth. “We were doing a lot of drills that cause that type of impact, and it was something that I would’ve never worried about,” Harvatine says. After graduating, Harvatine launched Jolt Athletics in 2013 to commercialize the sensor. While doing so, he received valuable advice from mentors at MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service, with whom Harvatine still keeps in contact today. “Honestly, I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do without VMS,” he says. Additionally, Harvatine says, MIT classes like Course 2.008 (Design and Manufacturing II) and Course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes) taught valuable lessons in product design and manufacturing, and in applying engineering skills to real-world applications. “Those are a couple of a long list of MIT courses I can point to that gave some useful insight into how the world works,” Harvatine says. (Comment on this)
12:00p	MIT develops self-shading windows A team of researchers at MIT has developed a new way of making windows that can switch from transparent to opaque, potentially saving energy by blocking sunlight on hot days and thus reducing air-conditioning costs. While other systems for causing glass to darken do exist, the new method offers significant advantages by combining rapid response times and low power needs. Once the glass is switched from clear to dark, or vice versa, the new system requires little to no power to maintain its new state; unlike other materials, it only needs electricity when it’s time to switch back again. The results are reported this week in the online journal Chem, in a paper by MIT professor of chemistry Mircea Dincă, doctoral student Khalid Al-Kaabi, and former postdoc Casey Wade, now an assistant professor at Brandeis University. The new discovery uses electrochromic materials, which change their color and transparency in response to an applied voltage, Dincă explains. These are quite different from photochromic materials, such as those found in some eyeglasses that become darker when the light gets brighter. Such materials tend to have much slower response times and to undergo a smaller change in their levels of opacity. Existing electrochromic materials suffer from similar limitations and have found only niche applications. For example, Boeing 787 aircraft have electrochromic windows that get darker to prevent bright sunlight from glaring through the cabin. The windows can be darkened by turning on the voltage, Dincă says, but “when you flip the switch, it actually takes a few minutes for the window to turn dark. Obviously, you want that to be faster.” The reason for that slowness is that the changes within the material rely on a movement of electrons — an electric current — that gives the whole window a negative charge. Positive ions then move through the material to restore the electrical balance, creating the color-changing effect. But while electrons flow rapidly through materials, ions move much more slowly, limiting the overall reaction speed. The MIT team overcame that by using sponge-like materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which can conduct both electrons and ions at very high speeds. Such materials have been used for about 20 years for their ability to store gases within their structure, but the MIT team was the first to harness them for their electrical and optical properties. The other problem with existing versions of self-shading materials, Dincă says, is that “it’s hard to get a material that changes from completely transparent to, let’s say, completely black.” Even the windows in the 787 can only change to a dark shade of green, rather than becoming opaque. In previous research on MOFs, Dincă and his students had made material that could turn from clear to shades of blue or green, but in this newly reported work they have achieved the long-sought goal of producing a coating that can go all the way from perfectly clear to nearly black (achieved by blending two complementary colors, green and red). The new material is made by combining two chemical compounds, an organic material and a metal salt. Once mixed, these self-assemble into a thin film of the switchable material. “It’s this combination of these two, of a relatively fast switching time and a nearly black color, that has really got people excited,” Dincă says. The new windows have the potential, he says, to do much more than just preventing glare. “These could lead to pretty significant energy savings,” he says, by drastically reducing the need for air conditioning in buildings with many windows in hot climates. “You could just flip a switch when the sun shines through the window, and turn it dark,” or even automatically make that whole side of the building go dark all at once, he says. While the properties of the material have now been demonstrated in a laboratory setting, the team’s next step is to make a small-scale device for further testing: a 1-inch-square sample, to demonstrate the principle in action for potential investors in the technology, and to help determine what the manufacturing costs for such windows would be. Further testing is also needed, Dincă says, to demonstrate what they have determined from preliminary testing: that once the switch is flipped and the material changes color, it requires no further power to maintain its new state. No extra power is needed until the switch is flipped to turn the material back to its former state, whether clear or opaque. Many existing electrochromic materials, by contrast, require a continuous voltage input. In addition to smart windows, Dincă says, the material could also be used for some kinds of low-power displays, similar to displays like electronic ink (used in devices such as the Kindle and based on MIT-developed technology) but based on a completely different approach. Omar K. Farha, a research professor of chemistry at Northwestern University who was not involved in this project, says, “Every time I open a new paper from the Dincă group, I am guaranteed to read about wonderful discoveries and well-executed science, and this paper no different.” He adds that given this material’s relatively rapid switching time, “I see no reason why the next generation Dreamliner [787] can’t use MOFs for its electrochromic windows.” Not surprisingly perhaps, the research was partly funded by an organization in a region where such light-blocking windows would be particularly useful: The Masdar Institute, based in the United Arab Emirates, through a cooperative agreement with MIT. The research also received support from the U.S. Department of Energy, through the Center for Excitonics, an Energy Frontier Center. (Comment on this)
11:59p	Needles that hit the right mark More than 13 million pain-blocking epidural procedures are performed every year in the United States. Although epidurals are generally regarded as safe, there are complications in up to 10 percent of cases, in which the needles are inserted too far or placed in the wrong tissue. A team of researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital hopes to improve those numbers with a new sensor that can be embedded into an epidural needle, helping anesthesia doctors guide the needle to the correct location. Currently, anesthesiologists must guide a four- to six-inch needle through multiple layers of tissue to reach the epidural space surrounding the spinal cord. They know when the needle has reached the right spot based on how the tissue’s resistance changes. However, some patients’ tissues vary from the usual pattern, which can make it more difficult to determine whether the needle is in the right place. “The needle is placed essentially blindly,” says T. Anthony Anderson, an anesthesiologist at MGH and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “The needle can go too far or into the wrong tissue, which means the patient doesn’t get the positive effect that you want or is injured.” In most cases, these complications lead to reduced effectiveness of the pain-killing drug, or an excruciating post-procedure headache. In rare cases in which the needle goes too far or into a blood vessel, a stroke or spinal cord injury can occur. Distinguishing tissues To improve the accuracy of epidural needle placement, Anderson teamed up with researchers at MIT’s Laser Biomedical Research Center, headed by Peter So, a professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering. So and MIT research scientist Jeon Woong Kang designed and tested several types of optical sensors that could be placed at the tip of an epidural needle and determined that the best is one that relies on Raman spectroscopy. This technique, which uses light to measure energy shifts in molecular vibrations, offers detailed information about the chemical composition of tissue. In this case, the researchers measured the concentrations of albumin, actin, collagen, triolein, and phosphatidylcholine to accurately identify different tissue layers. This sensor, which the researchers described in the journal Anesthesiology, provides immediate feedback telling the anesthesiologist which tissue the needle is in. As an epidural needle is inserted, it passes through five layers — skin, fat, supraspinous ligament, interspinous ligament, and ligamentum flavum — before reaching the epidural space, which is the target. Beyond that space lies the dura mater, a stiff membrane that surrounds the spinal cord and cerebrospinal fluid. “The sensor is continuously measuring Raman spectroscopy signals, which tells you the chemical composition of the tissue. From the chemical composition you can identify all tissue layers, from skin to spinal cord,” Kang says. The team found that Raman spectroscopy could distinguish each of the eight tissue layers around the epidural space with 100 percent accuracy. Two other techniques that they tested, fluorescence and reflectance spectroscopy, could distinguish some layers but not all eight. “Blind procedures” The researchers have tested the sensor in pig tissue and now plan to do further animal studies before testing it in human patients. They also plan to reduce the diameter of the sensor slightly, from 2 millimeters, which is too large to fit in the most commonly used epidural needles, to 0.5 mm. Jeanine Wiener-Kronish, chief of anesthesia and critical care at MGH, says this type of sensor could greatly improve safety for epidurals, as well as other procedures involving needles. “The era of blind procedures is one we need to move away from, because we’re very interested in improving safety and quality,” says Wiener-Kronish, who was not involved in the research. “This sensor could allow us to take a fairly blind procedure and be able to get more information about where the needle is.” The researchers have started a company, Medisight Corp., to continue developing the technology, which they believe could also be applied to medical procedures, such as cancer biopsies or injecting drugs into the joints, which can be difficult to do accurately. This commercialization effort is supported by MIT entrepreneurship programs, including the MIT Translational Fellows Program, MIT Venture Mentoring Service, and MIT Innovation Initiative. The team also received support from the National Science Foundation in the form of a Small Business Technology Transfer program grant. In addition to So, Kang, and Anderson, authors of the paper include Tatyana Gubin, an MIT undergraduate, and Ramachandra Dasari, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Chemistry. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2016/08/11 [Calendar]

Next Day >>