A concussion is often difficult to see.

Someone may look fine after a hit, fall, or other injury. They may want to get back to practice, class, work, or play. They may even feel mostly normal. But changes in reaction time, attention, balance, vision, coordination, or thinking can still be present—and symptoms may not always appear immediately.

That is one reason concussion assessment is so challenging.

Clinical evaluation, patient history, symptom reporting, and established assessment tools are all essential parts of the process. But concussion is not a condition that can always be reduced to one question, one score, or one moment in time. It requires clinicians to consider multiple sources of information and use their judgment in context.

At Ambient Insights, we are interested in a simple question: can technology help make some parts of neurological assessment more measurable?

More Information, Not a Replacement for Clinical Judgment

Objective measurement means looking at how a person performs a task—not only how they describe their symptoms.

Symptoms matter. They should always be heard, taken seriously, and discussed with an appropriate healthcare professional. But there are situations where symptoms alone may not tell the whole story. A person may minimize what they are experiencing because they want to return to activity. They may not yet recognize a subtle change in their own performance. Or they may have difficulty explaining something that simply feels “off.”

That is where objective measures may be helpful.

When someone performs a structured task, it may be possible to measure elements such as:

• How quickly they respond to a changing target
• How their movements change over time
• How consistently they perform
• How they coordinate vision, attention, and movement
• How they adapt when the task becomes more dynamic

The purpose is not to create a single number that replaces a clinician’s expertise. It is to explore whether these measurable patterns can provide additional context when clinical decisions matter.

Why Dynamic Tasks Matter

Concussion can affect more than one isolated ability.

In everyday life, people are constantly processing what they see, deciding what to do, moving through their environment, and adjusting to changes around them. A dynamic assessment task can bring several of those demands together.

For example, following a moving object may require a person to notice a change, process it, shift their attention, coordinate their movements, and continue adapting as the task evolves.

That kind of interaction creates a richer question than, “Did the person answer correctly?” It allows researchers to ask, “How did the person respond throughout the task?”

Small differences in timing, movement, or adaptation may not be visible to the eye. But with the right technology, researchers can study those patterns in much greater detail.

The Research Question Behind FlightPath

FlightPath was built around this idea.

The application uses a mobile mixed-reality task in which a person follows a virtual hummingbird through their real environment using a compatible Apple device. The experience is designed to be approachable: the person interacts with something simple and familiar—a moving target—while the technology captures information about the interaction itself.

Public coverage of FlightPath has described how the system can sample movement throughout the task, making it possible to study response timing and movement patterns as the person follows the hummingbird. PBS featured the early work and its connection to OSF HealthCare and the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria.

Behind that simple interaction is a research effort that brings together mobile sensing, LiDAR-capable Apple devices, mixed reality, movement data, and machine-learning research.

The goal is not merely to collect more data. It is to investigate whether the data contains meaningful and reproducible behavioral patterns that could complement existing approaches to neurological assessment.

Built Through Collaboration

Health technology should not be developed in isolation.

FlightPath grew out of collaboration among clinicians, engineers, researchers, and students connected to OSF HealthCare, Jump Simulation & Education Center, and the University of Illinois. That multidisciplinary approach matters because a useful health technology must make sense in more than one setting: it must be technically sound, clinically relevant, practical for the person taking the test, and rigorous enough to study.

OSF HealthCare has publicly described FlightPath testing with athletes at Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Bradley University as part of a clinical-trial and research coalition. Read OSF’s coverage of that work.

Those collaborations help ground the work in real questions from clinicians, athletic programs, and researchers. They also make the next step clear: careful validation.

From Data to Understanding

Collecting detailed information is only useful if it can eventually be organized in a way that people can understand and use responsibly.

That is part of the broader vision behind NeuroDNA, the clinician-facing and analytics side of our work. The long-term goal is to help translate complex assessment data into information that can support research, clinical discussion, and appropriate follow-up.

This is still a research journey. It requires continued study, comparison with established assessment methods, and a clear understanding of where technology helps—and where it does not.

What Objective Measurement Does—and Does Not—Mean

Objective measurement does not mean a device can diagnose every concussion on its own.

It does not replace medical evaluation, emergency care, or clinical decision-making. It does not remove the need to listen to patients or consider their full history and symptoms.

Instead, it represents an opportunity to add another perspective: measurable information about how a person performs during a structured task.

We believe better concussion assessment should not depend on one question, one score, or one moment. By exploring the capabilities of everyday devices, we hope to make neurological assessment more measurable, accessible, and useful—always alongside the expertise of the clinicians, researchers, and communities we work with.

That is the work ahead for FlightPath, NeuroDNA, and Ambient Insights: to keep building, testing, learning, and validating what objective measurement can responsibly contribute.