Head Health Network Transitions to Cloud

Head Health Network, a concussion care provider for a number of university and high school athletic programs, currently offers the only comprehensive service for contact sports that provides integrated impact monitoring, physical and cognitive assessment, and access to medical professionals. With a rapidly growing customer base, HHN relied on Sparkhound’s expertise to scale processing abilities and ensure proper performance of its concussion data and analytics platform.

Challenge

Server-Centric Environment Restricted Growth and Expansion of Services

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 the data is uploaded to the cloud for processing and then presented via dashboard displays and daily reports for coaches and medical professionals to analyze.

As more and more high schools and universities began using the platform, the HHN system became overwhelmed by the increased number of simultaneous users, causing delays to its real-time notification process. HHN needed to get raw data from helmet sensors into the cloud and quickly processed for real-time reporting scenarios and sideline evaluations.

Solution

Transition to Cloud Platform to Support Scalability and Improve Data Speed

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. Moving HHN from a server-centric environment to a cloud-based platform increased the performance of their compute resources, provided more powerful workload capabilities, and afforded the option to instantly scale the processing abilities to meet game-day requirements.

Additionally, Sparkhound built a mobile application which allowed HHN to get real-time, easily digestible data and push notifications into the hands of coaches and medical staff working on the sidelines. This app was quickly adopted by many of the HHN’s clients for use in practices and daily training regimens.

Transformation

Cost Efficient Growth and a Simplified, Streamlined, End-User Experience

Sparkhound helped HHN increase the value of their services by allowing them to cost-effectively process more data and scale the network through the cloud, to handle additional business. Now, HHN provides a simpler and more streamlined end-user experience.