Radhika Saran’s Rumble Rims: The Harvard Innovation Aiming to Bring Concussion Screening to the Sports Sideline

India-raised designer Radhika Saran and her Harvard teammates Cleo Pontone and Sophia DeVito have won the 2026 James Dyson Award’s Global Medical category for a low-cost infrared eye-tracking headset. Their invention could help make early concussion screening more accessible to schools and grassroots sports teams—but clinical validation remains the next crucial step.

An India-raised designer studying at Harvard University has earned international recognition for an invention addressing a serious problem in sport: identifying possible concussions before an injured athlete returns to play.

Radhika Saran, alongside fellow Harvard students Cleo Pontone and Sophia DeVito, has won the Global Medical category of the 2026 James Dyson Award for Rumble Rims, a lightweight headset designed to screen athletes for possible neurological impairment following a head injury.

The global winners were announced by Sir James Dyson on November 4, 2026. The team will receive £30,000 to support further development of the invention. The award places the three students among the year’s internationally recognised emerging design engineers, while bringing attention to a healthcare challenge that affects professional athletes and young people playing sport at community level.

From an Indian architecture background to Harvard innovation

Saran’s journey gives the achievement a significant international dimension. According to reporting by The Indian Express, she grew up in India, studied architecture and subsequently pursued higher education abroad. She is now enrolled in Harvard University’s Master in Design Engineering programme.

Her educational and professional path reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of innovation. Rumble Rims brings together design, engineering, sensing technology and an understanding of how people make decisions in high-pressure environments.

Pontone, Saran and DeVito are all students in Harvard’s Master in Design Engineering programme, a collaborative degree involving the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The team’s achievement is therefore not simply about developing a piece of sports equipment. It demonstrates how designers and engineers can work across disciplines to address a problem that has consequences for health, safety and access to care.

How does Rumble Rims work?

A concussion is a form of traumatic brain injury that can occur after a blow to the head or a forceful impact to the body that causes the brain to move rapidly. Identifying it on a sports field can be difficult. An athlete may not lose consciousness, symptoms can vary, and some signs may not become apparent immediately.

Rumble Rims approaches the problem by examining eye movement.

The headset uses infrared cameras and specially positioned optical components to track how an athlete’s eyes follow, focus on and respond to a moving visual target. The athlete completes a short eye-movement screening exercise while looking at a screen.

Harvard’s account describes a three-part system:

• Infrared headset: captures eye movements during the screening exercise.
• Coach-facing display: presents the measurements as accessible guidance to help inform an immediate decision.
• Recovery dashboard: allows repeated assessments over time, creating a record that can be reviewed by athletes, families and healthcare professionals.

The screening process is designed to take approximately two to three minutes. The underlying idea is that changes in eye movement can provide information about possible neurological disruption following a head impact.

The team says its current prototype was built for less than US$350. That is an important design ambition: expensive clinical technology may be beyond the budgets of many schools and community sports organisations. A more affordable system, if its performance is established, could potentially extend access to objective screening beyond specialist medical facilities.

Why the sideline matters

The sporting sideline is often where an important decision must be made quickly. A player may want to continue competing, a coach may be under pressure to keep a key athlete in the game, and symptoms may be difficult to assess through observation alone.

This is particularly relevant in youth sport, where schools and community clubs may not have specialist medical personnel available at every match.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that an athlete with a suspected concussion should be removed from participation immediately, kept out for the rest of the day and assessed by a healthcare professional. Return to sport is a medical decision, not a decision for a coach or an athlete to make independently.

A screening system such as Rumble Rims could eventually offer an additional source of information at this early stage. It may help identify athletes who need further assessment, rather than relying exclusively on visible symptoms or a quick judgement.

However, the technology should not be confused with a medical diagnosis or clearance to resume playing.

The critical next step: clinical validation

The award is an important milestone, but it does not establish that Rumble Rims can diagnose concussion reliably in real-world sporting conditions.

The inventors have stated that their next steps include developing a higher-fidelity prototype, refining the eye-movement test and validating the system with athletes, coaches, trainers and medical advisers. They also hope to explore pilot programmes with schools and youth sports organisations and pursue the appropriate medical-device validation pathways.

Several questions will matter as the technology develops. Researchers will need to establish how accurately it identifies possible concussion, how often it produces false alarms or misses injuries, and whether its performance remains consistent across different ages, sports and individual athletes.

The device must also be tested in realistic conditions, where lighting, movement, fatigue and the pressure of competition may affect measurements. A negative screening result must never be treated as proof that an athlete has not sustained a concussion.

These are not reasons to dismiss the invention. They are the necessary tests that separate a promising prototype from a dependable healthcare tool.

An achievement with international relevance

Rumble Rims has particular relevance for overseas Indian communities because it illustrates how Indian-raised talent can contribute to innovation within international academic and research institutions.

For Indian-origin students and professionals working abroad, Saran’s achievement is also a reminder that meaningful innovation is not confined to conventional technology sectors. Design engineering can contribute to healthcare, sports safety and public wellbeing.

The larger opportunity lies in whether the team can turn an award-winning concept into a tested and accessible product. If future studies demonstrate reliable performance, schools and community sports programmes could have another tool to support safer decisions after head injuries.

For now, Rumble Rims represents a promising development—not a finished solution. Its success will ultimately be measured not by the award alone, but by the quality of its validation and whether it can make sports safer without replacing professional medical judgement.