Profs design impact badges

Medics on the battlefield may soon have a new way of measuring battle wounds.

Penn researchers have developed a patch that changes color to indicate the intensity of exposure to explosions in the battlefield.

The School of Medicine’s Robert A. Groff professor of Neurosurgery Douglas Smith explained that the badge would be useful for medical personnel in the field, as the patch is lightweight and does not require power.

Smith, Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair and the senior author of the paper explaining the badge’s technology, said that the key quality of the badge is the easy-to-see color change. “You don’t have to be a highly skilled technician to get an immediate read out,” he explained.

According to Smith, traumatic brain injury is the signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is believed that the majority of soldiers abroad are exposed to some kind of blast and show symptoms of brain injury that prevent them from going back to work or school, Smith said.

“Although the changes in cognition are obvious in soldiers that suffer from a concussion, even an MRI can’t detect the damage,” Smith said. However, at least 15 percent of concussion patients have permanent dysfunction, emphasizing the need for blast badges to identify soldiers exposed to high-intensity explosions, he added.

The badge itself is sculpted by lasers and looks like layers of “Swiss cheese separated by columns,” Smith wrote in an e-mail. The device has been calibrated to have the columns collapse and the pores in the layers open wider when exposed to shock waves at levels above which are thought to induce brain damage, he explained.

Smith and his collaborators — Neurosurgery professor D. Kacy Cullen and Materials Science and Engineering professor Shu Yang — have yet to pick what colors will represent the spectrum of damage incurred to the brain in an explosion.

Smith anticipates the badge could be used to develop better protective equipment like helmets or other devices for people on the battlefield.

Helmet design and its use in bioengineering is an area of research that is expanding at Penn.

Bioengineering Chairman David Meaney and his team of researchers that span Penn, Duke and Columbia Universities received funding from the Department of Defense earlier this year to study the behavior of neurons in response to blasts.

Meaney plans to model blast events using crash test dummies and to study the change in the activity of neurons using embryonic rat brains, with special attention to how the cells are sensing the blast and reacting to it.

“New technology needs to be developed to study the change in neural networks without damaging them,” Meaney said, hoping to create devices that may enhance helmet design and protection used for military personnel in the future.

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