Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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ing job, they want to win the game, and there's a bravado associated with playing with pain and that culture that's been in the game a long time," said Soenen, who played football for 12 years and has coached it for another 12. "They've learned to manipulate the test and sandbag the initial baseline, and then when it comes time that they're really hurt, they don't look as hurt as they are." In January, the Notre Dame research- ers' proposal was accepted for fund- ing through the Head Health Initia- tive, a collaboration between the NFL and General Electric to improve player safety as a response to criticism the league has received in recent years. Soenen's proposal was one of 15 se- lected from the more than 400 submit- ted. "We're quite excited the NFL grant, and our winning that really validated the quality of our research," Soenen said. "Contect is very novel. We're tak- ing an entirely different approach, and that is the use of speech to detect con- cussions. There has not been a lot of research on that yet." The app runs a baseline test of an athlete's speech acoustics so that when a concussion is suspected, the player repeats the same words. The app de- termines the changes in the acoustics, which concludes whether a concussion has been suffered. "It's really hard to manipulate your voice's acoustic metrics," Soenen said. "Plus people don't know what those things are, and much less how to ma- nipulate them. That objectivity is very thorough when you talk to trainers." Soenen turned to his alma mater for guinea pigs. Each year, a few hundred Notre Dame students participate in Bengal Bouts and Baraka Bouts, box- ing competitions for men and women, respectively, that raise money for char- ity. Last year, participants were the first athletes tested on Contect's app. According to Soenen, the app will test more than 4,000 athletes and 45 athletic programs by the end of the year. Among the participants are Notre Dame's la- crosse, soccer and rugby programs, and high schools in Indiana, Pennsylvania and Chicago. "With every iteration and with more and more data and more and more peo- ple participating, that's what allows the underlying algorithms to get smarter and smarter," Soenen said. "This is one of those software applications that has a network effect. It's a business model in Contect co-founder Michael Soenen, a 1989 grad- uate of Notre Dame, is working with university researchers to develop a mobile app that uses acoustics to accurately diagnose athletes with head injuries. PHOTO COURTESY OF CONTECT