top of page
Football C-Spine Stabilization Device
During the first semester of my graduate program, I worked with four other grad students to perform ethnography to find a clinical need. We worked with Dr. Carola Van Eck, a sports medicine physician with UPMC, to develop a device that could improve the process of caring for football players immediately after sustaining a head or neck injury.
First, we met with Dr. Van Eck at Robert Morris University to observe her working with student athletes in their athletic training room. During that time, we created a drawing of the athletic training room, shown below, and took notes on the different patients that she examined. After an hour of observation, we asked her questions about what we observed and processes in sports medicine that needed improvement. Dr. Van Eck and other sport medicine staff performed a back boarding on myself with a football helmet and shoulder pads.
After meeting with Dr. Van Eck, we began the process of analyzing our ethnographic research. We took all of our notes from the Robert Morris visit and placed them into a worksheet that everyone could access. We filtered through the notes until we were left with ~50 notes and organized them into categories that were given titles. The affinitization process was formalized when we transferred the notes into a table so we could develop initial requirements for a device.
The first image on the right is the worksheet with Post-It notes from the visit and the bottom image is the table where the notes were transferred in categories.
This course centered around developing a low resolution prototypes in order to get clinical feedback on the design without spending a lot of money to develop the prototype. With these requirements, the group worked to develop a prototype in stages to to slide between the player's shoulder pads and helmet without moving the head and fold up into a support brace. The first full prototype is shown to the left and consists of the folding support frame, straps to secure the device to the player, and an inflatable cuff (represented by balloons) to fit the device to the players head and neck.
A separate design was also made for feedback on a different mechanism. This design is worn on the hands as gloves and is deployed when the hands wrap around the back of the neck to provide initial support to the player's spine. Similarly to the first prototype, this design has an inflatable cuff that spans each of the two components and provides support to the player so a responder can remove the helmet and shoulder pads.
bottom of page