HQ BaselineAbout the SCAT6
What the SCAT6 is — and what a digital concussion baseline looks like.
An independent explainer for athletic trainers, parents, and clinicians. The SCAT6 is the gold-standard paper assessment published by the Concussion in Sport Group. HQ Baseline is a separate commercial product for digital concussion baselines. Here's what each one is for.
What is the SCAT6?
The current gold standard for paper-based sport concussion assessment.
The Sport Concussion Assessment Tool 6 (SCAT6) is the 2023 update of the most widely used standardized concussion assessment in sport. Published by the Concussion in Sport Group (CISG) as part of the international consensus statement, it is designed for athletes ages 13 and older (the Child SCAT6 covers ages 5–12) and is used in two ways: as a baseline before the season, and as a comparison test if a concussion is suspected.
A baseline matters because “normal” performance varies between athletes. A post-injury reaction time in the 50th percentile may look fine — until you learn the athlete’s personal baseline sat in the 95th. Without a baseline, clinicians are comparing to a population. With one, they’re comparing to that specific brain.
The SCAT6 itself is free to download from the British Journal of Sports Medicine. What’s hard isn’t the form — it’s running structured assessments on 200 athletes a season, collecting objective scores, storing them somewhere searchable, and pulling the right record up at the exact moment an athlete hits the turf. Digital baseline products address that operational problem with a different toolset.
HQ Baseline at a glance
How HQ Baseline approaches the concussion-baseline problem.
HQ Baseline is not the SCAT6. It is a separate commercial product built to give athletic trainers and clinicians pre-injury data on an athlete — collected on the athlete’s own phone, scored by voice recognition and motion sensors, and stored in a searchable dashboard. Here’s what it includes.
Symptom evaluation
On-screen symptom rating with clear Likert scales and subtype-aware follow-ups.
Cognitive testing
Orientation, immediate memory, concentration, and delayed recall — voice-scored on the athlete's own phone.
Balance testing
Double-leg, single-leg, and tandem stances scored by the phone's accelerometer and gyroscope.
Tandem gait
Three-meter heel-to-toe walk timed by motion sensors — no stopwatch, no proctor.
Neurological screen
Oculomotor and coordination items prompted with clear self-guided instructions.
Decision support
Post-injury vs. baseline comparison with subtype radar, not a single composite number.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of the modules, see the how it works page. For published research on digital concussion baselines, see the research page.