{"id":44892,"date":"2022-08-28T13:33:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-28T17:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/news\/?p=44892"},"modified":"2022-09-05T07:19:52","modified_gmt":"2022-09-05T11:19:52","slug":"eye-opener-gary-wilkersons-sports-injury-research-expands-into-virtual-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/news\/2022\/08\/eye-opener-gary-wilkersons-sports-injury-research-expands-into-virtual-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Eye opener: Gary Wilkerson’s sports injury research expands into virtual reality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This<\/a>

This summer, Gary Wilkerson and UTC athletic training program members used virtual reality technology to test response efficiency with Chattanooga-area high school athletes. Photo and video by Angela Foster.<\/p><\/div>\n

On the athletic field, injuries happen.<\/p>\n

Some injuries are unavoidable thanks to the circumstances: Think of a football quarterback taking a hit from the blind side. He never saw it coming.<\/p>\n

Collision sports such as football, soccer, rugby, hockey and lacrosse constantly have athletes making contact with one another, frequently at high rates of speed.<\/p>\n

But many injuries are preventable, Gary Wilkerson said, and it all starts at the top.<\/p>\n

Wilkerson, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor in graduate-level athletic training and a researcher in the field for more than 30 years, said he started trying to understand the connection between the brain and injuries 12 to 15 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe began to see more knee and ankle injuries occurring after concussions compared to people who\u2019d never had one,\u201d he said, \u201cand then the question becomes, \u2018Why is having a concussion causing more knee and ankle injuries?\u2019 That\u2019s where we began to try to understand it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about the reaction time.<\/p>\n

\u201cReaction time is telling us how efficiently messages are being conveyed from one part of the brain to the other,\u201d said Wilkerson, who has taught at UTC since 1999 and has received the designation of National Athletic Trainers\u2019 Association (NATA) Fellow. He was inducted into the NATA Hall of Fame in 2016 and was awarded the NATA Foundation Medal for Distinguished Research in 2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a long-held misconception that specific parts of the brain perform specific functions. That\u2019s not true at all,\u201d he said. \u201cSpecific parts of the brain perform a function based on its connections with other areas. It\u2019s the interactions among these areas; you\u2019ve got messages going from back to front, front to back, back to side, and across side to side. They\u2019re like a pinball machine. These messages are going everywhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow efficiently those messages are being routed, processed and generating another message will be reflected in your reaction time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Gary

Gary Wilkerson, left, and Shellie Acocello worked with Chattanooga Christian School athletes in July.<\/p><\/div>\n

Several years ago, Wilkerson helped create a mobile phone application to capture cognitive response speed and accuracy. The app, a series of images on the phone prompting the user to tilt it left or right, tests cognitive processing efficiency through reaction times and accuracy\u2014which reflects an athlete\u2019s ability to detect, react and respond to environmental changes.<\/p>\n

But the data told only part of the story.<\/p>\n

\u2018The combination of the speed and the accuracy tells us a great deal about how efficiently the brain is processing that information,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a really good test and we\u2019ve learned a lot of things from that, but it\u2019s static because those arrows just sit there on the screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that we know is critical for athletes\u2014and for military personnel, law enforcement, anybody who is engaged in activities that require you to take in information from the environment and process that quickly\u2014is to make accurate decisions. We know that very specific parts of the brain respond to motion in the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

A collaboration that Wilkerson has been a research partner in for the last year is going next level.<\/p>\n

Wilkerson and the Boston-based REACT Neuro<\/strong><\/a> group\u2014led by neuroscientist Shaun Patel; Dr. Rudy Tanzi, the vice chair of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Dr. Brian Nahed, associate professor of neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School\u2014are using virtual reality technology to test response efficiency.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re the guys who originated the company, which was actually a commercialization of a project they started at Harvard,\u201d Wilkerson said, \u201cThe CEO, Shaun Patel, was a faculty member in neuroscience at Harvard before he left to run this company, so we\u2019re talking about heavy hitters in the world of neurology.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir work was pretty much being done with senior adults and trying to detect early- onset cognitive decline. They realized that there are lots of parallels between the effects of concussions and repetitive head impacts in young adults and what we\u2019re seeing in terms of degenerative changes in older adults. They talked to me about, \u2018How can we take what we\u2019re already doing and adapt that to get the most precise information that we can from young athletes?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

Lynette Carlson supervises Chattanooga Christian School athletes utilizing the VR equipment.<\/p><\/div>\n

Inside the virtual reality headset, instead of a flashing visual stimulus that elicits a response, there\u2019s movement you have to respond to with body movements.<\/p>\n

\u201cStand with your shoulders parallel to the red line on the ground,\u201d said the headset\u2019s voice. \u201cLook forward. Assume a \u201cT\u201d pose with arms out as far to your sides as you can reach. While holding the \u201cT\u201d pose, pull both triggers on your controllers to calibrate. For this task, you should assume a crouched ready position, feet shoulder-width apart, knees bent, hands in front of your chest, head looking forward at the cross in the center.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this task, you have to lunge to reach the target spheres to your left and right. When you hit a target, your controller will vibrate. Try lunging left or right to touch a sphere now. You will see circles move across your field of view. The circles will appear in the center and move to another direction or come in from your peripheral vision. When you see a filled circle move across the screen, hit the target in the same direction as the circle is moving. Try that now.\u201d<\/p>\n

It sounds like a cool game\u2014and in a way, it is\u2014but trying to prevent injuries is not a game.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things we know through training, and there\u2019s no doubt about this, is we can expand the range of the visual field,\u201d Wilkerson said. \u201cThere\u2019s a really interesting phenomenon here in the visual system.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he explained, people have foveal vision\u2014the central part of your eyes where you have a high degree of acuity in picking up details, but it\u2019s a little bit blurrier in the periphery of your eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour peripheral vision is well adapted to detect moving things in the environment,\u201d he said, \u201cand if we can improve the balance between the central vision and the peripheral vision, the range of that vision will get wider.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe wider that peripheral vision, the quicker you\u2019re going to pick up something coming from the periphery.\u201d<\/p>\n

For an athlete, the faster the reaction time, the better the chance to protect yourself, reducing the chance of injury.<\/p>\n

The VR technology combines a physically exerting whole-body movement response with cognitive decision-making.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main reason we\u2019ve moved to the VR is that you\u2019ve got total control over what goes on inside that visual environment,\u201d he said, \u201cand there\u2019s a very precise measurement of the responses. I\u2019ve never had anything before that I could measure eye responses with so precisely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The research is not just athlete-focused. Consider what increasing reaction times would do for military personnel.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re in the military, you certainly want to see the enemy first,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery millisecond you can gain\u2014and where you have to make quick decisions right or left\u2014can have enormous consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he\u2019s learned from working with ROTC, many of the cadets were high school athletes, \u201cand a lot of them had high school concussions. We still see the effects,\u201d Wilkerson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the work that I\u2019ve done with Olympic athletes, with high-level football players, with ROTC, we can see in our test results lingering effects of concussions that occurred six, seven, eight years earlier. The point here is that we want to try to intervene and manage those effects.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Two

\u201cThe main reason we\u2019ve moved to the VR is that you\u2019ve got total control over what goes on inside that visual environment,\u201d Gary Wilkerson said, \u201cand there\u2019s a very precise measurement of the responses. I\u2019ve never had anything before that I could measure eye responses with so precisely.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

This summer, Wilkerson and UTC athletic training program members, including Associate Professor and Athletic Training Program Director Shellie Acocello and Assistant Professor and Athletic Training Clinical Education Coordinator Lynette Carlson, performed VR testing with Chattanooga-area high school athletes. He also presented his findings, titled \u201cRelevance of Functional Connectivity among Brain Networks to Level of Sport-Related Injury Risk,\u201d at NATA\u2019s July national conference in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom my perspective, this research is foundational. It\u2019s critical,\u201d Wilkerson said. \u201cYou can have continuing injury problems that aren\u2019t getting resolved because you haven\u2019t gotten to the core driver of the ability to effectively protect the joint, and that\u2019s definitely in the brain. We have to understand it and know what to do about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have all the answers about how to manage these things yet, but you can\u2019t treat anything that you don\u2019t first detect. What we\u2019ve really been focused on is being able to detect these very subtle indicators that almost certainly make you vulnerable to more problems developing down the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

Can those effects be eliminated? That question can\u2019t be answered yet.<\/p>\n

But, through training, can those adverse effects be less problematic?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s some pretty good evidence that we can improve the efficiency of those rapid eye movements to take in more information in the environment,\u201d Wilkerson said. \u201cI\u2019m a big believer in objectively measuring whatever we can measure. If we\u2019ve measured it and we\u2019re persuaded it\u2019s there, we can intervene and do something about it instead of just hoping for the best.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sky is the limit. The possibilities for what we can learn are endless.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A collaboration that Gary Wilkerson has been a research partner in for the last year is going next level. Wilkerson and the Boston-based REACT Neuro group are using virtual reality technology to test response efficiency.<\/p>\n

Continue Reading <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1493,"featured_media":44903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_slider":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_featurette":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,56,3,7712,12806,83654,48007],"tags":[122057,122060,122058,122059,83551,83233],"class_list":{"0":"post-44892","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-college-of-health-education-and-professional-studies","8":"category-community","9":"category-faculty-and-staff","10":"category-health-and-human-performance","11":"category-health-and-wellness","12":"category-news","13":"category-research-academics","14":"tag-gary-wilkerson","15":"tag-graduate-athletic-training-program","16":"tag-lynette-carlson","17":"tag-react-neuro","18":"tag-shellie-acocello","19":"tag-virtual-reality","20":"entry"},"yoast_head":"\nEye opener: Gary Wilkerson's sports injury research expands into virtual reality | UTC News Archive: Jul 2007 - Oct 2025<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A collaboration that Gary Wilkerson has been a research partner in for the last year is going next level. 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