Injury Communication App: Patent 62/876,808

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During my senior year at RPI, I had the opportunity to take a Design/Engineering Senior Thesis course in which culminates my entire college experience as a design and engineering student. This project required me to produce a full thesis from project proposal and literature review through ethnographic research and prototyping. I decided to combine my passion for sports with my drive for innovation. As a former baseball player and gymnast for 10 years and a track and field athlete for 8 years, I noticed similarities between how injury is approached in sports.  This culminated in developing an idea and wireframe for an app that increases the communication between student-athletes, coaches, and athletic trainers with the goal of improving athletes' overall well-being when dealing with injury in sport. 

My scope of the project involved college athletes participating under NCAA affiliation. I have identified three major stakeholders, student-athletes, coaches, and athletic trainers, as each plays a substantial role in the recovery and play of student-athletes. Typically, athletes are unwilling to declare injury to their coach or athletic trainer in fear of being removed from play or practice. To investigate my assumptions, I began doing literature research in coach and athlete interaction and injury prevention in athletics in general. This progressed into semi-structured interviews with coaches and athletic trainers and a survey of 250 student athletes from dominantly D1 and D3 schools. 

Moving forward into my prototype, I relied heavily on the information I received from the various athletic trainers I had interviewed as they have the determining say on an athletes progress according to the NCAA handbook. My prototype dominantly focused on who is seeing the appropriate information to make decisions that focus on the athletes best injury recovery progression.