Wearable Sensor for Athletes Detects Potential Head Injuries

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

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.