Flashing LED mouthguards to be used in Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025

Flashing LED mouthguards will be used at the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 in the latest development for player welfare.

It is the newest advancement in technology for smart mouthguards, which were first introduced in 2021, with the most recent addition having been trialled in Major League Rugby and at the U20 World Championships.

The LED gumshields will flash red when a player experiences a head impact that passes a threshold determined by World Rugby.

“We are absolutely delighted to be introducing the LED into the mouthguard,” Dr Lindsay Starling, science and medical manager at World Rugby said.

“Previously, throughout 2024, most of the smart mouthguards you will have seen players wearing are white.

“Mouthguards players are wearing now are clear, and so on the side, you can see the LED board, the accelerometer and the gyroscope.

“When a player sustains an impact that results in an alert being triggered, not only is that alert being sent by Bluetooth to the match doctor on the side of the field, but the LED board on the side of the mouthguard flashes red.

“This will now be formally implemented as part of the HIA protocol in the Women’s Rugby World Cup and at every tournament that makes use of smart mouthguards starting after the Women’s Rugby World Cup.

“The reason for this is to create awareness; now everybody will be able to tell when a player has sustained a significant head impact during the match such that it has triggered an alert.”

A head impact that results in 65Gs for women and 75Gs for men, which relates to the linear movement of the head, and 4500 radians per second for both men and women, which is the speed of rotation, triggers an alert.

World Rugby are keen to stress the mouthguards do not detect concussion, with some knocks below the threshold for an alert leading to concussion, while some players who experience an impact that triggers an alert will pass a Head Injury Assessment.

The women’s game has led the way in terms of implementation around smart mouthguards and concussion protocols.

The instrumented gumshields were first formally used at the 2022 World Cup, while WXV was the first tournament to implement new HIA protocols.

With disparity between the professionalism of various unions’ set-ups in the women’s game, World Rugby’s chief medical officer Professor Éanna Falvey hopes the new protocols can have a trickle-down effect.

He said: “Since I have been in this role, we have moved that everything we invest in the men’s game, we invest in the women’s game in the same way.

“That is not always particularly easy because for some of the work we do, we need competitions to have the HIA process in place, so something like the World Cup for us is a real banner event where we have a high level of teams.

“We have not just the best teams in the world, but we have teams from developing countries in the sport. This is great exposure where we hope that having played at level, that can trickle back into their own country and their union can work hard to get the HIA process in place for them.”

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