Contego Sports and the EIC Accelerator: A Smart Rugby Headguard

Traditional rugby headgear, in the words of the neurosurgeon now testing it, was not designed to protect the brain. Contego Sports, a Galway company founded by Mark Ganly and Sandra Ganly and incorporated in 2014, makes N-Pro, a headguard designed to reduce the forces reaching the head. With EIC money it set out to go further: NProSend, a headguard with embedded sensors and artificial intelligence that would detect a likely brain injury as it happened.

The European Innovation Council granted €2,318,032 towards a €3.31 million project. It produced a working prototype and helped fund one of the largest studies of rugby headgear. The sensor headguard is not on sale. What N-Pro sells today is the passive headguard, and the independent evidence on whether it protects the brain is due in 2027.

Where Contego Sports Stands Today

The N-Pro website sells one headguard, at €149, and presents it as World Rugby trial approved and CE, UKCA and Category II PPE certified. It claims "4 times better impact protection than other rugby headgear" and up to 75% lower g-force. The product has no sensors.

The company's research effort is the Rugby Headgear Effectiveness Study, co-funded by the EIC and Contego Sports and run under World Rugby's Law 4 headgear trial. According to the IRFU, season one involved 189 players on 13 Irish teams, recorded more than 16,000 head acceleration events with instrumented mouthguards and banked more than 9,000 blood samples. Season two adds six teams and more than 300 players. Results are expected in the fourth quarter of 2027.

The Technology: Padding, Then Sensors

The N-Pro headguard uses a multi-layer material the company calls Defentex to absorb and spread impact energy. World Rugby first banned it from competition in 2016 until it had been independently assessed, then in 2019 made it the first headguard approved for its trial, after computational modelling at University College Dublin. NProSend was to add biomechanical and physiological sensors, send the data to a dashboard, and use machine learning to flag concussion risk.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran from March 2022 to December 2024. The CORDIS report describes "a working prototype which integrated both biomechanical and physiological sensors into the existing NPro headgear with transmission of data to a dashboard", a library of head impact profiles matched with computationally modelled diagnosed concussions, and a proof of concept for a "concussion risk alert and an AI enabled mTBI diagnostic". It states that regulatory submission of a commercial product was outside the grant's scope.

1. Sensor headguard prototypeDeliveredWorking prototype with dashboard, per CORDIS.
2. AI concussion detectionProof of conceptRisk alert and diagnostic demonstrated, not validated clinically.
3. Clinically approved productNot achievedNo regulatory submission; out of scope per CORDIS.
4. CommercialisationNot achievedOnly the passive headguard is sold.

What Has Happened Since the Award

The Money

We found no announced private funding round with an amount. The Irish register via Vision-Net lists the company as normal, with 29 shareholders. The award was "grant first", under which any EIC equity is decided later, and we found no EIC Fund investment. The EIC also appears as a co-funder of the headgear study.

Why Europe Should Care

The study runs under World Rugby's own headgear trial and includes amateur and female players aged 16 and over. Its results, led by an independent neurosurgeon, will feed into how the sport regulates headgear, and the EU has helped pay for both the product work and the evidence.

The Verdict

Contego Sports has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.