NFL teams already use high-end noise-canceling headphones on the sidelines but the receivers inside players’ helmets have to fight ambient noise. In the future there may be a way for coaches to send signals that not even the loudest crowd could drown out. In the next few weeks the Cowboys and a Dallas-based startup called MindTalk will begin testing prototypes of a mouth guard fitted with a small receiver during practice. The signal from the sideline is converted into vibrations by the mouth guard. Those vibrations travel through the player’s teeth to his jaw bone then to his inner ear, where they stimulate the cochlea just as incoming sound waves would. “You don’t actually hear it,” explains Nick Fragnito, one of MindTalk’s founders. “It almost feels like the voice inside your head.”

Fragnito, 25, and cofounder Rob Burke, 24, got their idea from their days playing football and from a musical trinket of their youth. In 1998, Hasbro made a lollipop holder called Sound Bites that used bone conduction to let kids listen to music while they sucked on a treat. MindTalk repackaged that technology and now hopes to use it for more than child’s play.

(full article published in Sports Illustrated, October 12, 2015)