Saran, Pontone and DeVito, all students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, went at the gap from the middle. On one side sits clinical equipment: infrared video-oculography, goggle-mounted cameras that flood the eye with invisible light and track the pupil at high frame rates, long confined to neuro-otology clinics measuring nystagmus. On the other side sits the sideline, where judgement has always belonged to whoever happened to be standing there. Their headset takes the clinic's method outdoors and hands it to the person holding the clipboard.
The device runs an athlete through oculomotor tasks — the kind of smooth pursuit and saccade work that the VOMS screen, published in 2014 by physical therapist Anne Mucha and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, grades by eye and by hand. Rumble Rims measures instead. It gives a coach a reading in the moment and then keeps going: a recovery dashboard tracks the athlete across the days and weeks that follow, when the decisions are quieter and just as consequential.
Saran said the team wanted coaches, athletes and families to have clearer information "at the exact moment of risk." The phrasing is careful. It is not a diagnosis they are offering, and they do not claim one.
Those laws exist because of a thirteen-year-old. Zackery Lystedt, a middle-school football player in Maple Valley, Washington, took a hit in a 2006 game, returned to play, and collapsed. He was left permanently disabled. Washington passed a law in his name in 2009; Mississippi, the last state, followed in 2014. The statutes require that a suspected concussion means removal from the field and clearance before return. What they cannot legislate is the suspicion itself. That still has to occur to someone, on grass, in real time.
The law can require a player to come off. It cannot tell the coach what they are looking at.
Which is why the most telling name in the project may not be a student's. Elliot Sawyer-Kaplan, a high school lacrosse coach, gave feedback while the device was being developed, and the team reworked it around what he told them. A headset that works in a laboratory and fails in a downpour with eleven players shouting is not a screening tool. Sawyer-Kaplan's contribution was the part engineers cannot simulate: what actually happens on a sideline.
The national win puts Rumble Rims on the road to the international shortlist, where Sir James Dyson chooses the overall winner himself and the prize rises to £30,000. Medical devices have taken that title before — a wound-dressing pH sensor from Warsaw in 2022, a urine-based breast cancer screen from Barcelona in 2020. Whether this one follows them matters less than whether it reaches the touchlines it was designed for.