Concussion machine that could prolong NRL careers

Eye Guide chief operating officer Shane Keating hopes eye-tracking technology will help extend NRL players' careers.

His comments come in the wake of Boyd Cordner's retirement during the week, with the former Australian captain calling time on his career after a series of concussions - aged just 29.

He's the second Sydney Rooster to hang up the boots this season, after Jake Friend also pulled the pin due to similar concerns.

The spotlight on concussion has been further magnified following the NRL's crackdown on high contact over the past month, which has led to a spate of penalties, sin bins, send offs and suspensions.

Some pundits have cried foul the very fabric of the game's being torn apart, while others have applauded the NRL for looking after the safety of their players.

Currently, players undergo subjective tests as part of concussion protocols, both during the game and afterwards, when they suffer head knocks.

It takes about 10 minutes to complete the in-game head injury assessment.

But the Eye Guide's a new technology that provides a measurable test of the effects of concussion.

It's currently being trialled across 10,000 Australian rules footballers in Victoria, a rugby union trial across six countries and they did a trial in Rugby League Brisbane last year.

Keating said their test would take about 10 seconds and can be easily used for follow up tests to see when players returned to their baseline reading.

But rather than use it to completely replace the current HIA protocols, he felt it would work best as an additional test.

If the trials go well, he felt the HIA process could be cut down to three or four minutes, enabling players to come back quicker if they passed.

But Keating felt the real value would be in extending players' careers by providing an objective test to when they've fully recovered from a head knock.

"We want to see people playing football for longer. There's definitely been lots of examples of late of NRL footballers in their prime having to hang up their boots in the early to mid 20s," he said.

"If a test like this can extend their career by five years - even if that means they sit out an extra game or two here or there.

"While that might be devastating at the time, but if it means they get extra time on their career that's got to be a good thing."

So how does it work?

Current protocols rely on players answering questions about how they feel, testing their balance, as well as using video evidence of the incident to determine whether they lost consciousness or stumbled.

But the Eye Guide uses a laptop with special software and hardware - which can be set up in the changerooms.

A player then follows a dot on the screen which moves in two adjacent circles - like a fallen over figure eight.

Their eyes are tracked and shown on the screen, and can even be printed out for verification.

If you produce a good looking fallen-over eight then you're OK. If you can't, then you're not.

That's the theory that's currently being put to the test.

"You've probably seen someone have a doctor wave a finger in front of their eye as part of a concussion assessment," Keating said.

"That's been around for many decades as a way of get a handle on someone's brain function with a simple, quick test.

"The Eye Guide system is the digital equivalent of that finger-waving test, so by doing a simple 10-second test - which consists of a white dot on an iPad screen moving about for 10 seconds and the user just has to follow that [with their eyes].

"And then our system will basically do the rest. Our system works out where they're looking and in real time makes an assessment of that and turns it into an output that's pretty simple to understand even if they're not a doctor or something like that.

"We're getting a lot of traction, particularly at amateur level where people don't have big medical teams on the sidelines. Volunteers can use it to get a bit more data and science behind their processes, which are normally pretty subjective processes."