Following the recent tragedies on boxing rings which is highlighted by four deaths, a professor of medicine, Mike Loosemore is spearheading the development of the technology that can help stall fatal injuries.
According to Daily Mail, a chip inserted into a mouthguard to provide live analysis of blows to the head. The initiative has reportedly received the backing of the British Boxing Board of Control.
On that account, Anthony Joshua’sdoctor wants the heavyweight to use the revolutionary new mouthguard that could help boxing’s fight against fatal head injuries.
The revolutionary new mouthguard that could help boxing’s fight against fatal head injuries
Professor Mike Loosemore, who is also GB Boxing’s chief medical officer, is spearheading development of the technology and hopes it could be introduced into Joshua’s camp after his upcoming rematch with Andy Ruiz Jnr.
Boxing has been rocked by four deaths in recent months. American Patrick Day passed away last week after suffering a brain injury, and Russian Maxim Dadashev, Argentina’s Hugo Santillan and Bulgaria’s Boris Stanchov have also all died since July from injuries sustained in the ring.
The latest tragedy came just weeks after Joshua’s trainer Rob McCracken claimed he knew the heavyweight was concussed in his defeat by Ruiz in June.
And Loosemore is advocating new technology which uses a chip inserted into a mouthguard to provide live analysis of blows to the head, sending the data to a nearby computer.
‘From a personal point of view, I’d like to get Anthony involved in using this,’ Loosemore said of the technology developed by Swansea-based company Sports & Wellbeing Analytics. ‘The product is what we’ve been looking for, really. We’ve been looking for something where we can measure the real impact on the head.
‘I could see it being used in boxers’ sparring. If they take some heavy shots, you could call the sparring off for the day or you could rest them up for a couple of days or a week, or until they’ve made a recovery. It would give us a better idea of the concussive blows the boxer was taking during sparring because at the moment we have really no idea.
‘We haven’t had those discussions with Anthony yet so I can’t say whether he’d be interested or not but I’d like to get him involved.’ From there, Loosemore hopes the technology — which has been trialled in rugby — could also be rolled out on fight night, providing coaches and ringside doctors with invaluable live insight into the health of each fighter.
‘You may be able to get to the point where you can say, ‘He’s had a certain impact, therefore it’s time to stop the fight’,’ Loosemore added. ‘It could change the dynamics of the way the fight was measured because you’d be able to tell if someone was taking a lot of heavy impacts or if they’d taken a very hard impact.’
Loosemore’s ambitions to introduce the technology have received the backing of the British Boxing Board of Control.
‘Anything that looks after boxers is good so we would be supportive of anything like that,’ BBBoC general secretary Robert Smith told Sportsmail. ‘Mike is a good man, I know him really, really well. We will be very supportive of anything he’s doing, absolutely.’
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The technology is ready to use and the hope is that one day the mouthguards would be tailored to individual fighters and their own concussion threshold.