12 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN When a member of Lehigh’s football team tore their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) during the first game of last season, it was a devastating injury that coaches expected could take up to a year to heal, said head coach Kevin Cahill. Thanks to information provided by wearable technology, which includes devices such as GPS trackers, blood oxygen saturation monitors, heart rate monitors, motion sensors and muscle oxygen sensors, the football player was able to be rehabilitated in half that amount of time, Cahill said. Hundreds of Lehigh student-athletes–including those on the football team–are participating in a study involving wearable technology led by Dhruv Seshadri, an assistant professor of bioengineering. The study is hastening athletes’ return after injuries, and more importantly, could provide objective data to guide rehabilitation programs and mitigate overuse injuries. The ACL is a band of tissue that connects the thigh bone to the shin bone and stabilizes the knee. When torn, the ACL usually requires surgery and rehabilitation that can take up to a year, sometimes longer. Wearable tech can provide a wealth of information about an athlete’s movements on the field, and it gives insight into how well they are training. In the case of Cahill’s football player, muscle oxygen sensors were used to determine how well the injured leg was recovering, and Seshadri’s team was able to share the data with athletic trainers who came up with a rehabilitation plan. “By their measurements, he was ready to go in six or seven months, so that’s huge. A lot of it has to do with what we are doing in the training room, and ACL injuries have unfortunately become more common,” Cahill said. Wearable tech has become increasingly popular on the field and in the gym in recent years. While there are a lot of devices out there, Seshadri says there’s room for improvement, particularly in how the data is shared with the user and how it can be translated into something proactive to guide decision-making. “I think there’s still a lack of actionable insight that can be gleaned from the data,” Seshadri said. “What I mean by that is a lot of these devices provide numbers, provide analytics, but what does that mean in the context of what the athlete is doing? That’s where artificial intelligence and machine learning can be applied to translate such data.” Seshadri and a team of students are working in the new Seshadri Lab at Lehigh to develop improved wearable tech for athletes and other groups, such as hospital W “By their measurements, he was ready to go in six or seven months, so that’s huge. A lot of it has to do with what we are doing in the training room, and ACL injuries have unfortunately become more common.” —LEHIGH HEAD FOOTBALL COACH KEVIN CAHILL
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