Three Ireland’s Grants for Small Businesses programme selects 10 micro-companies that receive a prize totalling €10,000. The amount is comprised of €5,000 cash and a further €5,000 in connectivity solutions and professional advice from its business experts.
For Peadar Lyons of Headhawk in Ballina, Co Tipperary, winning the award has upped the pace of his business’s progress significantly. Headhawk uses data to analyse and identify brain impact patterns in contact sports.
Lyons has a background in coaching. As well as working as a PE teacher, he runs football and soccer camps in summer and has played and coached everyone from kids clubs to women’s senior League of Ireland teams.
Before becoming a full-time PE teacher Lyons spent 20 years in the construction industry. He went back to education in 2016, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in education in 2021.
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“My passion was coaching, I’d been doing it forever,” he explains.
Both as a player and a coach, one issue that has always concerned him is how easy it is to miss a concussion in contact sports. It’s a traumatic brain injury that can be caused by a bump, blow, or sudden jolt to the head.
“I’ve seen clearly the effects of concussion on players,” says Lyons. “While most sports have protocols in place to help those suspected of having sustained one, the fact is that people don’t always respond the same way.
“Everyone is different. If two of us are standing side by side, my symptoms might be different from yours. Or your symptoms might show up immediately, while mine might not,” he explains.
“I’ve seen it first-hand and it’s very hard to know what to do. If a player is saying ‘I’m fine’ sometimes you have to protect them from themselves,” he says.
It’s not just the banging of the head that causes the injury so much as the banging of the brain off the inside of the skull, he points out. It’s why a sudden jolt, even where there is no external impact, can be damaging.
“If you have two players coming at one another at speed and blocking, the brain still moves at speed inside the head.”
Exacerbating the issue is the risk of what is known as second impact syndrome, where a player who has been concussed continues to play and suffers a second blow, sometimes fatally.
“But because the brain injury is impossible to see, it’s very hard for the club coach to make a decision,” he explains.
In other cases, a player will “explain away” their concussion as migraines, he adds.
To date a lack of objective data in relation to brain injuries in contact sports leaves many players suffering in silence.
“Without brain impact data, club medics cannot help their players to recover correctly or adapt their training to aid recovery, and understand how best to manage these invisible injuries,” he says.
To remedy this, Headhawk has developed software that uses complex queries from multiple sources to create new data sets on brain impacts and traumas in contact sports.
“From our new data sets, we can identify potential markers and brain traumas which may contribute to, or put the player at risk of, concussion,” he says.
Currently what data does exist is typically captured on match days only.
“People don’t get to see the training sessions, and not all players get to play in all matches. A lot of what we are doing will be aimed at training too. We are creating data sets that will give club medics the information they need to make more informed decisions.”
Lyons is working with Atlantic Technological University in Galway, a specialist in concussion research, to develop the software. Winning the Three Grant for Small Businesses has helped expedite his progress.
“Winning the award enabled us to pay for some software development,” says Lyons, who wants to take the product as far as he can on his own before going on the investment trail. “Holding on to 100 per cent of the business is key for me at this stage,” he explains.
Winning the grant also saw him receive a new iPhone and data-enabled iPad.
“It means we can take data live at pitch side using faster processors and bigger cloud capability,” he says.
“Everybody tells you to sell the future but in fact when we won the grant, we told Three what we needed right now to get to the next level, and they gave it to us.”
Perhaps most valuable of all is the credibility the win will give him when he goes to scale up.
“The recognition you get is huge. Once you have the backing of Three, everybody looks at you differently, especially investors,” says Lyons. “That’s why it has been a game changer.” headhawk.com
Three’s Grants for Small Businesses 2023 programme is now taking applications until Monday October 2nd. Find out more at 3.ie/grants