Sports participation have deep positive impacts on individuals, communities and societies, including improvements in academic performance, lower risk of cardiovascular diseases and lower absenteeism. However, the benefits related to sports are overshadowed by insufficient safety precautions and prevention practices which, in turn, can lead to negative socio-economic impacts. There are between 1.6 and 3 million sport-related concussions reported each year in the United States alone. Concussions are associated with higher healthcare expenditures, lost work days for parents providing care, the inability to return to school or work, and deteriorated family dynamics and social outlooks. In 43.4% of concussion cases, the management protocol is not completely followed either by the health professionals or the athletes. This calls for alternative assessment and monitoring methods that are more engaging, closer to the athlete's reality and that could empower by bringing self-awareness to the athletes and assistance to their entourage. To this end, we have developed a serious game (Simulation ENgageante Immersive et cognitive; SENIC) taking the form of a tablet application in which the athlete can watch a series of video sequences of his/her sport and must detect as quickly as possible a stimulus associated with an imminent potential danger or gameplay situations that require fast decision making by touching the screen at the location of the danger.
The objectives of the present study were to examine whether SENIC is associated with greater task engagement by the athletes than other more traditional tools and whether SENIC could be used on the side field to provide a quick assessment. A series of tests were conducted in which Université Laval's Rouge et Or soccer team players were asked to perform SENIC several times during their season. Results showed that SENIC is found to be more playful and engaging than the ImPACT test by all participants. Morever, task performance (number of false alarms, % of detection, detection time) was similar whether SENIC was performed before or after a game practice, indicating that task performance is not influenced by physiological activation, making its administration possible during a practice or a match. A small learning effect was found over the first three sessions, but task performance tended to stabilize afterwards. Taken together, our study suggests that SENIC could be used to compare the athlete’s performance at a specific point in time relative to previous test performance. SENIC has the potential to help better identify the cognitive impairment related to a concussion, and also to contribute to the decision of the athlete and his/her entourage to return to play by providing a dashboard of historical data.

A promising tool based on serious gaming to assist in the management concussions in sports