Head Health Network Selects Sparkhound’s Cloud Expertise to Help Remove Headaches of Real-Time, Helmet-To-Helmet Impact Data Processing

Sparkhound, a leading digital solutions firm providing trusted implementation of cloud services, custom applications, advanced analytics, and managed enterprise services, announced Head Health Network (HHN) selected the company to improve network performance as well as their ability to collect and process helmet-impact data from college and high school football games. Sparkhound established a Microsoft Azure cloud service to more effectively process player collision data for instant sideline evaluations.

HHN collects real-time helmet impact data from players by leveraging sensors placed between the inside padding and outside shell of a helmet. These sensors wirelessly transmit data to a server on the sidelines, where it’s uploaded to the cloud for processing and presented via dashboard displays and daily reports for coaches and medical professionals to analyze. Since many of HHN’s customers, such as LSU, Penn State, and Texas A&M utilize the HHN system simultaneously, the impact was overwhelming and began to bog down the real-time notification process. Sparkhound’s expertise was necessary to ensure proper system performance both now and into the future.

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“When it comes to building the firmware and sensors, we are experts. But when it came time to scale our processing abilities through the cloud, we needed outside, expert advice,” said Curtis Cruz, president, Head Health Network. “Sparkhound showed us how to streamline and improve our ability to get raw data from helmet sensors into the cloud and quickly processed for real-time reporting scenarios and sideline evaluations.”

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To improve the collision data speed and network scalability, Sparkhound worked with HHN to establish and configure an Azure cloud platform consisting of Queue Storage, Queue-Web-Worker, and Azure Virtual Servers. “Sparkhound’s cloud expertise runs deep and we knew this was the best option to effectively meet HHN’s requirements,” said Jonathan Meyers, Sparkhound’s Chief Technology Officer. “With the new cloud platform in place, HHN is able to increase the performance of their compute resources. Now they use blob storage to contain the files, experience more powerful cloud workload capabilities, and the option to instantly scale the processing abilities to meet game-day requirements.”

The net result, Sparkhound helped HHN increase the value of their services by allowing them to cost-effectively process more data and scale the network to handle additional business.

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