Motion-capturing tech assists DHR in athlete injury recovery

EDINBURG, Texas ( ValleyCentral ) — In high school sports, there is always the possibility of an injury that could affect your season.

DHR Orthopedic Institute is utilizing a new motion-capture technology called Trazer to assist in injury recovery and injury prevention.

Trazer is a portable device used by DHR physical therapists. The technology uses a camera that records injury-specific assessments and provides data that could be used to determine if an injury is improving.

Irving Alday, the Lead Physical Therapist for the Spine Team at DHR Health, said they work with the orthopedic surgeons and, in some cases, the school’s athletic trainer to assess a patient’s recovery.

“We use that information and create analytics and metrics that we share with the athletic trainers of the high schools and the physicians that refer them to us and that allows us to capture some of the nuances and the little details that unfortunately sometimes the naked eye can’t see,” Alday said.

Trazer uses drills, exercises and games to assess a patient’s movement.

Sarah Reilly, Lead Physical Therapist of the Sports Team at DHR Health, said the activities make therapy more positively engaging for the patients.

“I feel like people get more involved and are more excited about things when they’re having fun and so it’s a cool tool that we can use to kind of replicate more sport-specific activities as well as get them more involved and more engaged in their own therapy process as well,” Reilly said.

The Trazer can analyze full-body injuries as well as concussion injuries. It uses balance assessments to determine if concussion symptoms are still present.

“Trazer does have a way to do different exercises for concussions, and it kind of gives us a better idea of how they’re progressing,” Reilly said. “We can do it in between treatments as well to allow them to make sure that they’re safe to go back to sport cause at the end of the day that’s our biggest concern.”

Alday said the DHR team plans to make this technology available to school varsity teams throughout the school year to have more baseline data if a player gets an injury down the road.

“Sport season just began in high school so we’re not hoping for any injuries but when they are coming in, we want to start using it as a way of getting baseline with these athletes or patients and then tracking them,” Alday said.

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