World Rugby 'confident' in mouthguard technology

World Rugby's Lindsay Starling has underlined the governing body’s confidence in data provided by new smart mouthguards after Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend voiced concerns over the technology.

Townsend spoke out after the Calcutta Cup victory over England, when a second Scottish player in successive matches went off for a head injury assessment that was triggered by mouthguard technology.

"I think we have to really watch what we are doing here by trusting technology that has not been proven," Townsend said. "There is a bit more work to do before this technology is correct."

Starling, World Rugby’s science and medical manager, says that seven players in this season’s Guinness Six Nations have been removed from the field purely due to alerts from mouthguards.

The technology features an accelerometer and gyroscope to measure magnitude and frequency of head acceleration events experienced by players during a game.

The Six Nations is the first elite men’s competition to use the technology, which is designed to help with identifying a need for head injury assessments and provide in-game alerts to medical teams.

Starling, who leads on the mouthguard project for World Rugby, said that those seven players had the biggest impacts out of 9,500 head accelerations in nine games so far.

"That is to put it into perspective regarding how rare and small these numbers are in terms of the players coming off," she said.

"For a player to be removed, it means they have sustained a really big knock.

"We are confident in the data that comes from the mouthguards and confident in the technology. We wouldn’t be introducing this on such a large scale if we weren’t confident in the data that is coming from them.

"From research we’ve done over the last