Anthony Joshua has been urged by his doctor to use the revolutionary new mouthguard that could help fight against fatal head injuries as it provides live analysis of head blows.
According to Daily Mail, Professor Mike Loosemore, who doubles as GB Boxing’s chief medical officer, is heading the development of a new technology; a chip inserted into a mouthguard that provides live analysis of blows to the head, sending the data to a nearby computer and hopes it could be introduced into AJ’s camp after his match with Andy Ruiz Jnr.
In recent months, the boxing world has been rocked by a series of deaths resulting from injuries sustained in the ring. Patrick Day from America passed away last week after sustaining a brain injury, Russian Maxim Dadashev, Argentina’s Hugo Santillan and Boris Stanchov are among deaths recorded since July.
Joshua’s trainer, Rob McCracken revealed the champion suffered from a concussion after his Ruiz defeat in June and as a result, Loosemore is advocating the use of the new technology.
According to him; ‘From a personal point of view, I’d like to get Anthony involved in using this,’ Loosemore said of the technology developed by Swansea-based company Sports & Wellbeing Analytics. ‘The product is what we’ve been looking for, really. We’ve been looking for something where we can measure the real impact on the head.
‘I could see it being used in boxers’ sparring. If they take some heavy shots, you could call the sparring off for the day or you could rest them up for a couple of days or a week, or until they’ve made a recovery. It would give us a better idea of the concussive blows the boxer was taking during sparring because at the moment we have really no idea.
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‘We haven’t had those discussions with Anthony yet so I can’t say whether he’d be interested or not but I’d like to get him involved.’ From there, Loosemore hopes the technology — which has been trialled in rugby — could also be applied in other sports.
‘You may be able to get to the point where you can say, ‘He’s had a certain impact, therefore it’s time to stop the fight’,’ Loosemore added. ‘It could change the dynamics of the way the fight was measured because you’d be able to tell if someone was taking a lot of heavy impacts or if they’d taken a very hard impact.’
The initiative has received the backing of the British Boxing Board of Control.
