The push to develop remote technology that can sense a concussive hit to the head and measure its effect on the brain is heating up, thanks to a global challenge issued by GE and the National Football League.

While the NFL is helping in the initiative, the damage caused by concussions can be felt far beyond the sports world, through businesses and schools and even in the military. Experts say the technology on display in these challenges - which includes everything from blood tests to mobile brain imaging scans to apps - might also be used to aid in the treatment of people with neurological disorders.

Sixteen academic and healthcare organizations, ranging from health systems to entrepreneurs, have been named winners of the first round of the $20 Million Head Health Challenge, a global contest to spur improvements in the detection and treatment of traumatic brain injuries caused by concussions. The winners were announced by GE and the NFL, which launched the Head Health Challenge in March 2013 as part of a four-year, $60 million Head Health Initiative. The initiative includes a four-year, $40 million research and development program coordinated by GE and the NFL to develop new technologies to detect brain injuries caused by concussive hits, and $20 million in investment spread out over two challenges.

The 16 winners named last week will receive $300,000 apiece to advance their work "to speed diagnosis and improve treatment for mild traumatic brain injury." As many as six of the finalists will win an additional $500,000 when the challenge concludes with another round of judging in 2015. A second, ongoing challenge, launched by GE and the NFL in a partnership with Under Armour, will invest up to $10 million in projects that "look for new innovations and materials that can protect the brain from traumatic injury and for new tools for tracking head impacts in real time."

"These studies hold the promise of advancing brain science in important ways," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a press release. "The health and safety of our players is our top priority, and this challenge extends that commitment to the general population as well. We hope the innovative approaches proposed by these winners will have a lasting impact on the treatment of head injuries."

"We launched the challenge as a call to action to fast-track advancement in head health," added

Sue Siegel, CEO of GE Ventures and healthymagination, added in the release that the program has demonstrated "breakthrough ideas" already. "By advancing the work of these winners, we will better understand brain injuries suffered by athletes and members of the military and improve our knowledge of the brain overall which could help improve our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's."

More than 400 participants from 27 countries entered the first challenge. The winners are:

• Banyan Biomarkers of Alachua, Fla., which is developing a point-of-care blood test to rapidly detect the presence of mild and moderate brain trauma to improve the medical management of head injured patients. The company is working with the University of Florida on a sports concussion research study to analyze biomarkers, neurocognitive testing and neuroimaging on athletes with concussions.
• BrainScope, of Bethesda, Md., for its work with the Purdue Neurotrauma Group to conduct a study in collegiate athletes using imaging biomarkers such as functional MRI (fMRI) and Diffuse Tensor Imaging (DTI) to potentially enhance BrainScope’s urgent care, handheld EEG-based traumatic brain injury detection technology. 
• The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), whose Brain Imaging Center is developing software that determines if the connections that transmit information across different parts of the brain are damaged after head injury.
• The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), which is working with Ayasdi, a Silicon Valley start-up, to develop high-quality, detailed MRI and CAT scans of the brain that can better identify patients who are more likely to experience persistent symptoms and need additional support following a concussion or mild traumatic brain injury.
• Cortical Metrics of Semora, N.C, a start-up that was spun out of the University of North Carolina, which is working on a device that can connect to any computer or laptop and vibrates the fingertips, activating adjacent places in the brain that typically communicate with each other. A web-based program would then measure a person’s brain health by determining how well those places in the brain communicate with each other.
• ImmunArray, based in Richmond, Va., and Rehovot, Israel, which is developing methods to diagnose the connection between immune system response and the progression of a brain injury.
• The Indiana University School of Medicine, in Indianapolis, whose Center for Neuroimaging, collaborating with St. Vincent Sports Performance, is using an MRI to investigate how brain blood flow is altered after concussion in high school athletes.
• Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, which is using positron emission tomography (PET) to study several markers in the brains of active NFL players.
• The Medical College of Wisconsin, based in Milwaukee, which is using MRI scanning technology to determine the direct effects of sports-related concussions on brain structure and function.
• The University of Montana in Missoula, Mt., for its work to identify blood-based biomarkers that indicate how the brain reacts following a traumatic brain injury.
• The University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Ind., which is working with mobile software company Contect to developing a mobile app that helps athletic trainers, coaches, physicians and parents detect concussions by recognizing the changes in speech acoustics that occur with concussions.
• The University of Pittsburgh, working with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to link impairments from concussion with changes in the brain using an imaging technique called high definition fiber-tracking (HDFT).
• The Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, which is working on an imaging method to identify patients and athletes at risk for secondary injury after a concussion.
• Quanterix, based in Lexington, Mass., for working on a blood test to aid in the detection of traumatic brain injury.
• The VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, based in Espoo, which is working with the University of Helsinki to study the reaction of small molecules (such as cholesterol, glucose, amino acids) in the body after a mild traumatic brain injury TBI.
• Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, for using PET and advanced MRI technologies to determine the earliest known biological responses to brain injury in professional boxers with well-established diagnoses of dementia, football players with recent concussions, and control patients who have never sustained a head injury.