Popular Science

50 POPULAR SCIENCE OctOber 2012

january 2013 POPULAR SCIENCE 51

strained brains Most helmets do a

good job preventing skull fractures but do

not directly address concussions.

Athletes in the U.s. sUffer

3.8 million sports-relAted

concUssions eAch yeAr.

While helmet mAkers dither

With smAll improvements,

sWedish scientists hAve

bUilt something thAt

coUld protect Us All.

story by tom foster

photogr aphs by tr Avis r Athbone

THE HELMET WARS

On August 19, 2012, in week two of the NFL preseason, Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Austin Collie ran 17 yards out from the line of scrimmage, cut right toward the center of the field, caught a pass, and was immediately tackled by Pittsburgh Steelers corner-back Ike Taylor. As Taylor came in for the hit, his helmet appeared to glance off the left side of Collie’s helmet. Then the cornerback wrapped his arm around Collie’s neck and jerked the receiver’s head to the right. An instant later, Steelers linebacker Larry Foote came barreling in from the opposite side and slammed his elbow into the right side of Collie’s helmet. As the receiver fell to the ground, his helmet first hit Foote’s knee and then struck the ground face-first.

52 POPULAR SCIENCE january 2013

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year In ScIenceHelmet WarS

Collie sat up, dazed, and had to be helped off the field a minute later. He didn’t return to play for three weeks. The diagnosis: concussion. It wasn’t the first time Collie had suffered what’s clinically called a traumatic brain injury. On November 7, 2010, he spent nearly 10 minutes lying motionless on the 34-yard line after being hit in the head almost simultaneously by two Philadelphia Eagles players. Medics carried him off the field on a stretcher. In his first game back, two weeks later, he left in the first quarter with another concussion. He missed three more games, only to suffer yet another concussion on December 19, which ended his season.

Professional football players receive as many as 1,500 hits to the head in a single season, depending on their position. That’s 15,000 in a 10-year playing career, not to mention any blows they received in college, high school, and peewee football. And those hits have consequences: concussions and, according to recent research, permanent brain damage. It’s not just football, either. Hockey, lacrosse, and even sports like cycling and snowboarding are contributing to a growing epidemic of traumatic brain injuries. The CDC estimates that as many as 3.8 million sports-related concussions occur in the U.S. each year. That number includes not only profession-als but amateurs of all levels, including children. Perhaps most troubling, the number isn’t going down.

In the past two years, the outrage surrounding sports-related concussions has mounted. In January 2011, Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) called for a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the football helmet industry for “misleading safety claims and decep-tive practices,” which the agency is currently pursuing. In June 2012, more than 2,000 former NFL players filed a class-action suit against the league as well as Riddell, the largest football-helmet manufacturer and an official NFL partner, accusing them of obfus-cating the science of brain trauma. The litigation could drag on for years and cost billions of dollars.

The real issue is that lives are at stake. In 2006, this fact became tragically clear when former Philadelphia Eagles star Andre Waters committed suicide by shooting himself. Subsequent studies of his brain indicated that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage that results in dementia and is caused by repeated blows to the head. A sicken-ing drumbeat of NFL suicides has followed, including former stars Dave Duerson, Ray Easterling, and Junior Seau, who by one esti-mate suffered as many as 1,500 concussions in his career.

For equipment manufacturers, the demand for protective headgear has never been greater. Leading companies, as well as an army of upstarts, have responded by developing a number of new helmet designs, each claiming to offer unprecedented safety. The trouble is that behind them all lie reams of conflicting research, much of it paid for, either directly or indirectly, by the helmet manufacturers or the league.

For players or coaches or the concerned parents of young

athletes, it’s hard to know whom to believe. And despite all the research and development, and the public outcry, the injuries just keep coming. What makes the situation even more tragic is that a helmet technology already exists that could turn the concussion epidemic around.

T h e T r o u b l e w i T h c o n c u s s i o n s

To understand why current helmets aren’t better at reducing concussions, consider the nature of the injury. A concussion is essentially invisible. Even the most advanced medical-imaging technology isn’t sensitive enough to show the physical manifestations,

the damaged brain tissue. Diagnosis, then, is based entirely on symptoms and circumstances. Is the patient dizzy or confused, or was he briefly unconscious? Does he have a headache or nausea? Does he remember what happened, and did it look like he got hit in the head really hard?

Even if doctors could reliably diagnose concussions, identifying the injury does little to protect against it; for that, scientists need an

Professional fooTball Playersreceive as many as 1,500 hiTs To The head in a single season. ThaT’s15,000 in a 10-year Playing career.


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accurate picture of what’s happening inside the head. For generations, doctors believed that concussions were a sort of bruising of the brain’s gray matter at the site of impact and on the opposite side, where the brain presumably bounced off the skull. The reality is not nearly that simple: Concussions happen deep in the brain’s white matter when forces transmitted from a big blow strain nerve cells and their connec-tions, the axons.

To understand how that happens, it’s important to recognize that different types of forces—linear and rotational acceleration—act on the brain in any physical trauma. Linear acceleration is exactly what it sounds like, a straight-line force that begins at the point of impact. It causes skull fracture, which makes perfect sense: You hit the bone hard enough, it breaks.

Rotational acceleration is less intuitive. It occurs most acutely during angular impacts, or those in which force is not directed at the brain’s center of gravity. You don’t have to know much about football or hockey to realize that rotation is a factor in a whole lot of hits. “Think about it,” says Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon at Boston University School of Medi-cine and the author of 29 books on neurology and sports medicine. “Because most hits are off-center and because our heads are not square, most of the accelerations in the head are going to be rotational.”

Further complicating matters, the human brain is basically an irregularly shaped blob of Jell-O sitting

Xenith X2Made by the nine-year-old helmet company Xenith, the X2 replaces foam padding with an array of air-filled cylinders that compress upon impact by releasing air through tiny holes. the harder the hit, the stiffer the response. such adaptive cushioning can protect against both lower-level and higher-level forces but still does little to address rotation.

rawlings Quantum Plusbetter known for its baseball helmets, rawlings introduced a line of football helmets a few years ago that, like riddell’s, relies on what’s called large-offset design—in other words, increased distance between the head and the shell in order to make more room for extra padding.

schutt ion 4dMade with thermoplastic urethane cushioning that performs consistently even in extreme weather, the Ion 4D, schutt says, “is designed with the intent to reduce the risk of concussions.” yet the specs don’t mention rotational force, and a 2011 promotional video dismisses the idea that frequent lesser impacts are as dangerous as the rare violent one, calling it “unproven.”

sgh helmet this startup from the self-proclaimed godfather of safety, motorsports-equipment legend bill simpson, says it makes the lightest helmet on the market. Its shell includes Kevlar and carbon fiber; its padding consists of a single layer of a proprietary composite whose makeup simpson won’t divulge until it is patented.

guardian caP Developed by atlanta engineer Lee hanson, the guardian Cap is a padded sock worn over a standard helmet. Critics say the guardian could get caught during impact, causing neck injuries and exacerbating rotation. hanson says the sock would just slip off. as for the obvious aesthetic issues, he says the guardian is meant only for practice, not games.

riddell 360the official NFL helmet partner since 1989, riddell launched the 360 in 2011. It has extra padding around the front and sides of the head, and the company’s signature Concussion reducing technology, which adds even more padding. yet for all that foam, most experts say it does little to address rotational forces, the primary cause of concussions.

crash course The helmet market is booming. What sets the new products apart?

the Fallen Junior seau’s suicide in 2012 heightened the controversy around head trauma in athletes. Colts receiver austin Collie [above] received three game-ending concussions in 2010 before he was benched for the season.


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inside a hard shell lined with ridges and cliffs. After a football tackle or a hockey check, that blob moves, and does so in irregu-lar ways. “Rotational forces strain nerve cells and axons more than linear forces do,” Cantu says. “They’re not only stretching, but they’re twisting at the same time. So they have a potential for causing greater nerve injury.”

So what’s the problem? If scientists know that a concussion is nerve strain caused largely by rotation of the brain, why can’t they figure out a way to stop the rotation?

Just as the actual injury isn’t visible to medical imaging tech-nology, the rotation that causes the injury isn’t measurable in impact conditions; scientists cannot be inside an athlete’s brain measuring its movement. But in a grisly 2007 study, researchers at Wayne State University in Detroit used a high-speed x-ray to observe the brains of human cadaver heads fitted with football helmets and struck from various angles. The research, corrobo-rated by computer models, showed that the brains moved very little—just millimeters. Yet those small movements are enough to cause nerve strain and affect neurological function.

Making things even more difficult is that every brain is differ-ent. Young brains respond differently than older brains, female brains differently than male. Researchers have also found that weaker, subconcussive hits can have a cumulative effect over time and lead to CTE, which is likely the cause of many former-player suicides. But how many hits it takes, and what kind, is unclear—and the condition can’t be diagnosed while the player is alive. Only when his brain is cut open can researchers spot the dead zones in the tissue.

The scientific ambiguity surrounding concussions clearly

impedes the development of better helmets. But there’s another reason helmet technology hasn’t improved, one more troubling than gaps in our knowledge: a self-regulated industry governed by badly outdated safety standards.

4 0 - y e a r - o l d s Ta n d a r d s

Picture the head of a typical crash-test dummy, the kind you see in car commercials. It’s attached to a rigid metal arm that hangs above a cylindrical anvil topped with a hard plastic disc. A lab technician straps a football helmet to the headform, cranks the arm up to precisely

five feet above the anvil, and lets it drop—crack. Inside the dummy head, an accelerometer positioned at the center of gravity records the linear acceleration transmitted during impact. This brutish trial is called a vertical drop test, and it’s the basis for how all football helmets are certified safe by the National Operating Committee

shock treatment stefan Duma, a biomedical engineer at Virginia tech, studies the forces exerted on a helmet during a vertical-drop test [left]. the test is the basis for the NoCsaE football helmet safety certification. Duma also tests helmet performance during horizontal impacts [above].


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if scienTisTs know ThaT a concussionis caused largely by The roTaTion of The brain, why can’T They figureouT a way To sToP The roTaTion?

on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE), an association funded by equipment manufacturers, which in turn funds much of the research on sports-related head trauma. The standard has remained largely unchanged since its creation in 1973.

Now think back to Austin Collie’s concussion in August 2012—the jerking of the head after the initial hit, the collisions with Larry Foote’s elbow and the ground. Those impacts don’t look much like the straight-line force of the NOCSAE drop test. And that brings up a very important question, perhaps the central question

scientists and helmet makers are trying to solve today: Is the linear acceleration measured by a drop test correlated to rotational acceleration, and if so, by how much?

Untold lives and billions of dollars in sales, medical fees, and litigation costs could depend on a clear answer. If the relation-ship between the forces is strong, the key to reducing rotational acceleration is the same as reducing linear acceleration: Add more padding. Clearly helmet manufactures would prefer such a simple solution. If the connection is weak, however—or at least weak in the most dangerous hits—more padding will do little to reduce concussions, and companies will need to rethink current designs entirely, a very costly endeavor.

In 2003, a New Hampshire–based company named Simbex introduced a research tool called the Head Impact Telemetry System (HITS). Among other things, it seemed to have the poten-tial to answer the question of correlation. HITS is an array of six spring-loaded accelerometers positioned inside a helmet to record


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the location and severity of significant impacts. After any hit over a certain threshold, the system beams the data to a companion device on the sidelines. Coaches can monitor players in real time, and researchers get reams of real-world data to dig through. Stefan Duma, the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Injury Biomechanics, is among those working with HITS data; at his urging, every player on the univer-sity’s football team wears a HITS-equipped helmet. After analyzing data from two million impacts, Duma says there is a clear and strong connection between linear and rotational forces.

Unfortunately, other researchers say it’s not that simple. The correlation is high if you look at all hits, they say, but it falls apart when you look at highly angular ones—the hits that carry a greater risk of concussion. “Take an extreme example,” says Boston University’s Cantu. “If you impact the tip of the face mask, if you have another player coming at it side-ways, you’re going to spin the head on the neck and have very low linear acceleration and very high rota-tional acceleration.”

Indeed, for every advocate of the HITS data, there exists an equally vocal critic. They say that helmets deform under the force of a 250-pound linebacker, skewing data. They say the HITS algorithm that calculates rotation is flawed. They point out that the founder of HITS is a co-author on all the published studies that validate the system. Blaine Hoshizaki, a biomechanics professor at the University of Ottawa whose research focuses on angular hits, sounds exasperated when I ask him about Duma’s find-ings. “You’ve got to look at the events that are really contributing to concussion,” he says. “It may be that in 1,000 hits, only 50 are highly non-centric, but maybe those 50 are the most dangerous—and that’s what our data shows.”

In essence, the system created to answer questions about concussions has raised a lot more questions. The resulting confu-sion sets off a cascade of effects. Unclear science makes for unclear standards, and unclear standards leave a lot of room for interpretation. The impact on the helmet industry is conspicuous: It’s become a free-for-all.

T h e h e l m e T a r m s r a c e

In December 2010, a longtime auto-racing safety equipment maker named Bill Simpson happened to attend one of the Colts games in which medics helped Austin Collie off the field after a concussion. Following the incident, Simpson asked the Colts’ offensive coordinator, a friend, what had

happened to his receiver. “Oh, that’s just part of the game,” the coach said. Simpson saw an opportunity. In auto racing, he’s known as the

Godfather of Safety, and once set himself on fire to demonstrate the efficacy of one of his racing suits. He figured he could make a better football helmet, so he got to work in his Indianapolis ware-house. By 2011, several pros, including Collie, were wearing early

experimental versions of Simpson’s helmet. That an individual inventor could develop, produce, and deliver

a product into the hands of professional athletes speaks to the upheaval in the world of helmet manufacturing. What was once a rather staid industry dominated by a few large companies has now grown to include an increasing number of upstart firms, serial entrepreneurs, and individual inventors. The result has been a proliferation of new designs. Mainstream helmet makers have stuck with variations on previous models: polycarbonate shells filled with various densities and thicknesses of padding. Newcom-ers have developed more creative, albeit less rigorously tested, approaches. Perhaps the best-known is the bizarre-looking Guard-ian Cap, a padded sock that slips over a typical helmet. Another

“if someThing is available ThaT makes your helmeT more safe, you should be held liable for not using iT.”

imPact tracker Coaches and medics can

use the head Impact telemetry system (hIts) to monitor the force and

location of certain tackles from the sidelines.


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the sYstem The Multidirectional Impact Protection System (MIPS) reduces the rotational forces that cause concussions. In a MIPS-equipped helmet, a thin layer of molded plastic fits atop a player’s head, beneath the padding and hard polycarbonate shell. Rubber straps affix the MIPS layer to the helmet.

how it works MIPS mimics the human head’s own protective system, in which a layer of slippery cerebrospinal fluid sits between the brain and the skull. When an impact occurs, the skull can rotate just a bit relative to the brain. With MIPS, the rubber straps allow the helmet to move just a bit relative to the sliding, low-friction head cap, thereby eliminating much of the twisting motion before it reaches the brain.

the results In lab tests, MIPS reduces brain rotation by as much as 40 to 50 percent.

approach that received a lot of attention in 2011, the Bulwark, came from the workbench of an aerospace engineer and self-professed “helmet geek” in North Carolina; it had a modular shell that could be configured to match the demands of different play-ers. It never made it out of prototype stage.

For his part, Simpson officially launched his SGH helmet in October 2012 to immediate fanfare. Sports Illustrated “injury expert” columnist Will Carroll tugged one on and had someone whack him over the crown of the head—a strong, almost purely linear force. He reported not feeling much at all. His conclusion: This helmet must work.

When I called Simpson to discuss the helmet and ask how it reduces the forces responsible for concussion, he mentioned that none of the neuroscientists he’s spoken with have been able to tell him what forces actually cause a concussion. “How do you know you’re stopping the right forces, then?” I asked him. “If you don’t know what’s causing a concussion, how can you prevent it?”

“You’re asking me a lot of questions that are pretty off the wall, my friend,” he said. “A lot of questions I can’t answer.” He explained that his helmet uses a composite shell made of carbon fiber and Kevlar, plus an inner layer of adaptive foam made of

Styrofoam-like beads. It performs better in a NOCSAE-style drop test than anything else on the market, he said.

“Does it specifically address rotational acceleration?” I asked. He laughed. “No helmet does that.”I tried a more direct approach: “Can you make claims about

concussion reduction with your helmet?”“Oh, hell no,” he said, “I would never make a claim about that.”The NFL, at least since Congress took an interest, has gotten

serious about sorting out who is claiming what—or not. “There is not a week that passes that I don’t see a new device,” says Kevin Guskiewicz, a University of North Carolina sports medicine researcher and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient who also chairs the NFL’s Subcommittee on Safety Equipment and Playing Rules. “There’s a binder weighing down the corner of my desk. I don’t think you’re going to see the NFL flat-out endorsing a product, but they certainly feel that they’re responsible for trying to help prevent these injuries. So we’re going to be reviewing these technologies in order to say, here are three or four that need to be studied further.”

The boldest claim from mainstream helmet makers comes, perhaps not surprisingly, from Riddell. The company’s newest helmet, the 360, builds on a system called Concussion Reducing

the Helmet that might Save Football

Polycarbonate Shell

Foam Padding

Sliding Layer

Rubber Straps

Pre Impact At Impact


Technology (CRT), which it first launched in 2002. According to a highly adrenalized promotional video, which has since been removed from the Riddell website, engineers designed CRT in response to an NFL-funded study by a Canadian research lab called Biokinetics. Researchers looked at film from actual NFL hits that resulted in concussions and attempted to map their loca-tion, distance, and speed. The two main findings: that rotational acceleration is a major factor in concussions, and that players get hit a lot on the side of the head.

In response to the study, the designers developing CRT added energy-attenuating material (extra padding) to side- and front-impact areas. They also increased the overall dimensions of CRT-equipped helmets by a few millimeters to allow for still more padding. The designers of the 360 built on the CRT but went a step further, adding an even greater amount of padding to the impact areas. It wasn’t clear to me how those changes addressed rotation—the single greatest factor in the concussions that CRT and the 360 helmet meant to reduce. So I asked Riddell’s head of research and development, Thad Ide. “Well, in many cases the linear acceleration and the rotation that linear imparts go hand in hand,” he said, echoing Duma’s HITS findings at Virginia Tech. “Reducing linear forces will reduce the rotational forces.”

So the question remains: If addressing linear force is the key, and better padding is the way to do that, then why hasn’t the number

of concussions decreased? “You haven’t seen it change because [the helmet makers] haven’t addressed it,” says the University of Ottawa’s Hoshizaki.

a n e w h o P e

In a small room off the basement garage of a building on the outskirts of Stockholm, an entirely different kind of helmet test is taking place. Peter Halldin, a biomechanical engineer at the Royal Institute of Technology, is strapping a helmet onto a dummy head affixed to a custom drop-test

rig. Rather than slamming a helmet into a stationary anvil, as in the NOCSAE test, Halldin’s rig drops it onto a pneumatic sled that moves horizontally. By calibrating the angle of the helmet, the height of the drop, and the speed of the sled, Halldin says he can more accurately re-create the angular forces that result in rotational acceleration than other labs can. Within the dummy head, nine accelerometers measure the linear force transmitted during impact; a computer nearby calculates rotational accelera-tion from that data.

Today Halldin is testing two ski helmets that are identi-cal except for one thing: Inside one, a bright yellow layer of molded plastic attached with small rubber straps sits between the padding and the head. This is the Multidirectional Impact

calls For justice Former NFL players Daryl Johnston and Dave Duerson [above] in 2007 at a senate hearing on disability benefits for retired athletes. Duerson [left] committed suicide in 2011 by shooting himself in the chest. he left a note asking that his intact brain be donated to the boston University school of Medicine for research.

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The nfl, aT leasT since congress Took an inTeresT, has goTTen serious abouT sorTing ouT who is claiming whaT—or noT.



Protection System (MIPS), which is also the name of a company he co-founded. Halldin spends about half of his time as CTO of MIPS and the other as a faculty member of the Royal Institute.

The idea behind MIPS is simple: The plastic layer sits snugly on a player’s head beneath the padding. By allowing the head to float during an impact, MIPS can elimi-nate some of the rotational force before it makes its way to the brain.

First up in Halldin’s test is the non-MIPS helmet. Halldin flips on a high-speed camera and steps back from the impactor, ready to catch the helmet on its rebound. “Five, four, three, two, one…” There’s a loud clattering as the sled shoots forward at 22 feet per second and the helmet drops to meet it at 12 feet per second—crack.

I can see on the computer that the head sustained about 170 Gs of linear force, and it rotated 14,100 radians per second squared (the standard scientific metric for rotation). It’s a big hit, one that would probably result in a concussion or worse.

Now comes the second helmet. Every variable is the same as in the first test except for the addition of the low-fric-tion MIPS layer. “Five, four, three, two, one…”—crack. This time the computer shows rotation of 6,400 radians per second squared, a 55 percent reduction.

Halldin starts in on a detailed explana-tion of the effects of multiple impact tests on the performance of a helmet over time, but I interrupt: “How would you charac-terize that test result?”

He looks at the colorful graphs on the computer screen again. If the test dummy were a football player, he would have just walked away from a game-ending impact without a concussion. Halldin smiles just a bit, and permits himself a very un-Swedish boast. “I would say that’s f--–king amazing.”

Halldin is careful not to claim the MIPS system can create those kinds of results in all impacts in all helmets. But, he says, “we can reduce rotation in all directions, and it’s significant in most directions. We might get 35 percent in one direction, 25 percent in another direction, and 15 percent in another. And hopefully the 15 percent is not in the most common impact direction for that sport.”

MIPS is not new: The company’s roots go back to 1997, when Hans von Holst, a neurosurgeon at Stockholm’s Karolinska Hospital (the same hospital that adjudicates the Nobel Prize for medicine), got tired of seeing patients come in with brain injuries from hockey and other sports, and decided to do something about it. He joined up with Halldin at the Royal Institute, and together they spent the next 10 years studying traumatic brain injuries.

Rotational forces quickly became their focus, and eventually they came up with the idea for MIPS. The first product was a complete helmet, designed for the equestrian market. Although the helmet was well received, the team quickly learned that a smart concept in the lab doesn’t easily translate into a successful product launch. Production problems and quality-control issues led the team to rethink their strategy and hire a new CEO, an experienced Swed-ish executive named Niklas Steenberg. Steenberg took a look at the situation and decided that, like airbags in cars or Intel chips in laptops, MIPS was not an end-market product. Instead they would focus on licensing it to existing helmet companies so those manu-facturers could improve their own products.

the diseaseFor decades, the term “punch-drunk” has been used to describe boxers left permanently loopy after a career of fighting. the clinical name for the condition is chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CtE), and it can happen to any athlete who suffers frequent blows to the head. CtE has no known treatment, and doctors can only diagnose it postmortem, by physically examining the brain for symptoms.

how common is it?scientists at the Center for the study of traumatic Encephalopathy at boston University examine the brains of dead contact-sports athletes. In its first year of operation, 17 of the 18 brains researchers tested had CtE. also, a team of scientists recently reported that former NFL players are three times more likely than the general population to die from brain diseases such as alzheimer’s.

what causes it?at its most basic, CtE is a cumulative effect from repetitive head trauma—not just concussive blows but also weaker ones. Impacts damage the brain’s neural pathways, and as a result a protein called tau builds up. the more tau along the pathways, the less easily brain signals can move around, which can lead to memory loss, lack of impulse control, aggression, and depression.

what does it mean For helmets?because football helmet safety standards were designed to prevent skull fracture, padding has to be stiff enough to weather an extremely hard hit. but stiff cushioning allows a lot of force to reach the head. over time, that can lead to CtE. Certain companies, such as Xenith, have begun to use adaptive cushioning. It stays stiff during a big impact, but softens during a smaller one.

What’s behind the nFl Suicides?

dead zones Dark spots in the brain of a former football player

correspond to the buildup of tau protein.

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C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 7 6


Since then, MIPS has licensed its sliding low-friction layer to about 20 helmet manufacturers, for sports from snowboarding and skiing to cycling and motocross. Recently, Steenberg decided, the company was ready to start hunting

would fall all over themselves to license or create something like MIPS, a simple product that directly addresses a critical factor in concussions and incorporates easily into existing helmet designs.

“I thought we’d have people hugging us, saying, ‘Thank you!’ ” says Ken Yaffe, a former NHL executive who left the league in March 2012, after 19 years, and signed on with MIPS to help them get an audi-ence with U.S. manufacturers. But after nearly a year of squiring Steenberg and Halldin around to different companies, he says, “we’ve been met with skepticism.”

One of the reasons, Yaffe suspects, is that current safety standards don’t require the companies to do anything more than what they’re already doing. It’s a criti-cism privately echoed by most helmet researchers: Simplistic certification stan-dards provide convenient legal cover for the manufacturers. If NOCSAE certifies a company’s helmets as safe, then the company has less risk of being held respon-sible for injuries. On the other hand, if that same company goes above and beyond the standards, it could put itself at risk of getting sued: Suddenly all of its existing helmets would appear to be inadequate, and worse, the company might have to admit knowing that they fell short.

Duma, of Virginia Tech, points to NOCSAE’s industry funding to explain how such a situation has persisted in football. “Follow the money,” he says. “Imagine if Ford were the only organiza-tion testing its cars, and it was saying that every one got the top rating. It’s a very unusual arrangement.”

To Steenberg, the MIPS CEO, the situ-ation is both harmful and backward. “If something is available that makes your helmet more safe, you should be held liable for not using it,” he says. It’s not the first time a new safety technology has faced such a paradox. All too often implementa-tion hangs on the grim calculus of whether the cost to industry of adopting a safety measure is more or less than the cost to the public of going without it. When liabil-ity enters the equation, lawyers and judges and lawmakers get involved, and even the most urgent matters can end up mired in argument. For example, it took more than a decade to legislate seat belts as standard equipment in automobiles. It’s worth noting that the two companies that first popular-ized and implemented seat-belt standards

the big game—first American hockey and then the biggest of all, football.

f o l l o w T h e m o n e y

One would think the Riddells of the world

C O N T I N U E D f R O m P A G E 5 9


were Saab and Volvo, both Swedish. Change is on the horizon, though. The

University of Ottawa’s Hoshizaki has a grant from NOCSAE to develop a new standard that incorporates rotation. “I want to be fair to the manufacturers,” he says. “If they could make a safer helmet, they would. I don’t think they are against it; they’re just making sure they don’t cross that line and say, ‘Yeah, we should be managing rotation,’ because that would bring up liability issues.” With a new stan-dard, that roadblock could vanish.

One enterprising company has already launched a product to directly address rotational acceleration in another contact sport. In the summer of 2012, Bauer, the number-one helmet maker in ice hockey, released the Re-akt. Inside the helmet, a thin, bright-yellow layer of material sits loosely between the head and the padding, allowing the head to move a little bit in any direction during an impact.

Called Suspend-Tech, the layer appears, to the color, suspiciously similar to MIPS. In fact, during the development of the Re-akt, MIPS co-founder Halldin tested an early version on his impact rig at the Royal Institute. The stories diverge as to how that collaboration came about, and how Bauer came up with the idea for a sliding layer, but any questions that arise about intel-lectual property may not matter. Bauer’s Suspend-Tech is a significant debut: It is the first attempt by a mainstream company to include a rotational layer in contact-sports helmets. MIPS is betting that since one hockey manufacturer has embraced the idea, the rest of the field will start shop-ping for their own version. And that, in turn, could create enough momentum for MIPS to break into the football market.

In perhaps the most hopeful sign of all, the NFL acknowledges that MIPS-like products have the organization’s atten-tion. Kevin Guskiewicz of the NFL’s safety equipment subcommittee says the league is already evaluating the concept. “We’re looking at it very seriously,” he says.

Meanwhile, as scientists do more tests and manufacturers bicker, 4.2 million people will suit up and play football this year, most of them children with still-developing brains. Every one of them needs a good helmet.

Tom Foster is based in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first story for Popular Science.



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