  American football is a leading sport for contact-related injuries such as
cervical spine injuries, some of which result from an unforeseen hit. The use
of a feedback mechanism to alert an athlete of a potential hit may mitigate the
risk for sport-related concussion and catastrophic injury by allowing athletes
to effectively brace for an otherwise unforeseen impact. In this project, we
created a proximity sensor system using radio frequency identification (RFID)
technology to send haptic feedback to the wearer before a potential impact. Our
pilot test consisted of three participants who wore our novel sensor system,
who ran simulated routes to represent player-to-player contact. Additionally,
we used simulated data from a Network Live Football (NFL) league game to
further validate our contact prediction algorithm. Results show that our method
can predict players' collisions with less than 14% false-alarms.
