NeuraLyfe
91.7% of NFL players have a disease that can only be diagnosed after death. I designed the system that sees it in the living.
Role
Strategy & Systems Lead
Timeline
48hr hackathon
Built with
Figma Make, SketchUp, Claude
Outcome
1st Place out of 690 submissions
CTE has no cure and can only be diagnosed after death.
No scan.
No blood test.
No way to detect it in the living.
91.7%
of NFL players studied were found to have CTE.
Players are living with undiagnosed brain damage. Depression. Memory loss. Families find out at autopsy.
Some players have taken their own lives and chose to preserve their brain so researchers could finally confirm what they suspected. The only proof of CTE comes after death.
The one person who can change this is the sideline doctor. They have seconds, not minutes. And right now they have no data.
Primary user
Sideline doctors
The person I'm designing for. Every screen answers their question: pull the player or not?
Players
Hide symptoms to protect roster spots. Can't self-report.
Coaches
Not villains, just blind. No visibility into cumulative damage.
Last year I had a concussion. The effects lasted months but nobody could see them. It was a fraction of what these players go through, but it taught me something: invisible damage gets treated like it doesn't exist.
The science exists. The evidence doesn't. I knew exactly what to build.
4 designers, 72 hours. Nothing in football tracks brain damage. I started there.
The NFL tracks every muscle and joint across 32 teams. Zero visibility into brain trauma. Practice has no medical staff. I sketched the sensor placement and a front-facing camera on a whiteboard. A teammate elevated it into a full product render. The biomarker science is real. This is a speculative concept designed around it.
The doctor doesn't read a chart. They see a brain.
I researched the biomarkers, figured out how three signals combine into one risk score a doctor can act on in seconds, and built the brain visualization from a 3D model I split by neurological region. Each section lights up based on where damage is accumulating.
Shows disease
progression.
Shows active
neural damage.
Shows neuroinflammation and
structural breakdown.
p-Tau 217 — Shows disease progression.
NfL Level — Shows active neural damage.
GFAP — Shows neuroinflammation and structural breakdown.
Another designer built a view for players. It surfaced a question the team hadn't asked yet.
The view showed athletes their own brain damage during the game. Players can't act on that mid-play. It would push them to hide more. I pulled the team together. Someone brought up a player whose wife watched him deteriorate for years. He wouldn't stop. The family only got confirmation at autopsy. That story changed the room.
The person with the problem isn't always the person you design for.
I redirected the view to coaches and doctors. Now they can replay impacts, spot patterns across drills and formations, and change the playbook. If the same drills keep causing damage, change the game before the next hit happens.
A doctor scanning 53 players needs to know who's at risk without searching.
From impact data to one decision: pull the player or not.
Brain damage was invisible. Now a doctor can see it, act on it, and change the outcome.
1st place. 690 submissions. 2,000+ participants. Then the real conversations started.
4 countries, 72 hours. We focused everything on the user and the system. It turned a speculative prompt into something people wanted to be real.
We're now in conversations with Brian Holloway, former NFL offensive lineman, and the LA Rams to explore what comes next. People have been coming up to us with their own stories. They don't just like the idea. They need it.
Full demo
Try the prototype
I felt what invisible damage does. I fought to make it visible. And 690 teams later, the one that won was the one that designed for the person nobody was thinking about.
