For most people, the phrase “put your money where your mouth is” represents a figure of speech. At Bite Tech Inc. in Greenwich, the saying is meant to be taken literally.
Bite Tech, a manufacturer of mouth guards for athletes, is gearing up to release a high-tech product line this June that will help trainers and medical professionals more accurately diagnose concussions and head trauma.
The BTX2 Impact Intelligence System allows coaches and trainers to simultaneously monitor all of their athletes through computer chips embedded in custom-designed mouth guards that transmit real-time data to a laptop or smartphone on the sideline.
“We looked at our core business and started to ask ourselves, with 3.8 million sports brain injuries every year ”¦ how can we take our product line to the next level?” Bite Tech CEO and Chairman Lawrence Calcano said.
The system is a collaboration of Bite Tech and X2 Impact Inc., a Seattle, Wash., technology developer, and is being tested and refined in ongoing collaboration with Stanford School of Medicine researchers, Calcano said. In addition, the BTX2 system has been tested by the football teams at Stanford, the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina, among others.
In mid-2010, Bite Tech began exploring how it could efficiently manufacture sports mouth guards embedded with impact-sensing computer chips. Six months later the company partnered with X2 Impact, which was already engineering similar technology components.
With roughly 50 employees, Bite Tech has offices in Greenwich, Minneapolis and Toronto, and manufactures all of its products in Dania Beach, Fla.
The company has begun to market the BTX2 system to high school, collegiate and professional athletic programs across the country, and is aiming to start shipping its product in the first week of June, Calcano said.
With millions of sports-related head injuries every year, lawmakers across the country have started enacting stricter standards for high school athletes. Currently, at least 30 states have laws protecting athletes who show symptoms of a concussion from returning to play.
“The problem is, there are still a very large number of concussions that go undetected,” Calcano said.
In the realm of sports science, Calcano said the BTX2 system has the potential to be a game-changer by helping coaches and trainers to diagnose concussions and other less severe impacts that previously have gone unnoticed and untreated.
The computer chip implanted in the BTX2 mouth guard is designed to measure each individual impact and acceleration felt by the brain, Calcano said, providing the ability to track each athlete over the course of one game or an entire career.
“It has both in-the-moment benefits and significant long-term benefits,” he said.
Calcano cautioned that the system will not diagnose concussions, but said it adds a significant tool to trainers”™ arsenals.
“We”™re not going to tell you ”˜This is what it means,”™ but we”™re giving a tool to medical experts,” he said.
Bite Tech also plans to market the BTX2 system to the military, Calcano said. “There is a very significant military application for this.”
Both Calcano and Lauren Jones, director of sales for Bite Tech, said the technology would be affordable to a wide range of organizations.
“We are absolutely building it to be affordable to a large number of groups,” Calcano said.
In the early development stages, Bite Tech tried affixing the computer chip, which was engineered by X2 Impact, to custom-molded mouth guards. In the time since, however, the company has acquired a patent for a boiled rubber product called Vistamaxx, which was originally engineered by Exxon Mobile Corp. and which has significantly lowered the system”™s overall cost.
Calcano declined to disclose how the system would be priced, saying it would likely vary from client to client depending on the number of athletes in a given program.
“We feel like this is going to dramatically change the way we see sports and the way that we treat contact sports,” Jones said.
