Steve Rowson remembers the day he was first requested about helmets. An engineering pupil at Virginia Tech (VT) in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the time, Rowson and some of his classmates had been approached by the gear supervisor of VT’s school soccer staff, who needed to know what helmets had been most secure to buy.
Rowson and his fellow college students discovered that information didn’t exist. “So we bought the helmets that were available at the time, tested them all, and saw huge differences,” Rowson says. “We told our team which was best, they replaced all their helmets, (and) we made that data available to everyone. That’s how the helmet ratings were born.”
Those first rankings had been launched in 2011. Fast-forward to at the moment, and Rowson is now the director of VT’s Helmet Lab, overseeing the following era of scholars utilizing know-how to examine and check the best way commercially out there helmets within the US price for safeguarding towards head accidents.
The lab has expanded far past soccer, Rowson says, to embrace hockey, equestrian, snow sports activities, lacrosse, biking and others. It additionally contains areas exterior of sport, corresponding to head safety for construction workers.
“The technology is critical to what we do,” he says. “If you think about what we first started doing, it wasn’t an original thought. You can look back to the 1970s and see the suggestion of someone saying, ‘well, we should stick sensors inside football players’ helmets so we can study head impacts.’ The problem was the tech wasn’t there at the time – it was too big, it was bulky, it wasn’t accurate. And as we went through the years, the instrumentation got smaller, it got more accurate, and we got to the point where it’s practical to use.”
In Rowson’s lab, helmet-clad, custom-built “head forms” are subjected to impression exams that embrace being dropped to the bottom or hit by mechanical arms, whereas sensors contained in the helmet measure linear and rotational movement, serving to decide the quantity of power on the top. The helmets are rated from one to 5 stars primarily based on elements particular to the game or exercise.
That data is made out there to the general public by the lab’s website. Standard helmet security certifications within the US are pass-fail, so the intention of the ranking system is to present a extra detailed breakdown: did it simply scrape by, or go with flying colours?
The lab will get its funding in a lot of methods. Its preliminary bike helmet analysis, for instance, was funded by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and it additionally supplies R&D and testing companies for firms that make helmets. However, it says that its rankings are unbiased of all producers.
One of the scholars in Rowson’s lab is doctoral candidate Caitlyn Jung. When she first began there, the main focus was on grownup bicycle helmets, however her newest analysis will price youth bike helmets.
“It’s going to start with looking at how kids hit their head in terms of location and speed,” Jung says, which differs from adults; youngsters are sometimes using at a slower tempo and are nearer to the bottom than an grownup. It would possibly sound apparent, however the testing ought to replicate these circumstances, she provides, for “figuring out what helmets best perform in those impact scenarios that are most likely to happen in the real world.”
Inside Virginia Tech’s Helmet Lab
For college students like Jung, the work presents sensible functions – serving to athletes, coaches, gear managers and oldsters make extra knowledgeable choices round head security.
“I’m most looking forward to the ability of consumers to just go and be confident in their decision of choosing what head protection device they want to use, whether it’s a helmet in football or in a bicycling,” Jung says.
The dialog round head accidents and concussions in sport has been within the highlight within the final 20 years, particularly throughout the sport of soccer. Studies present a rising variety of identified circumstances of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in former gamers.
In 2023, the Boston University CTE Center introduced that practically 92% of the 376 former National Football League (NFL) gamers they studied had CTE.
While rule changes to the sport designed round security have come into play, so have completely different helmet options – corresponding to additional helmet coverings, which match over the participant’s current helmet. Since these first helmet rankings appeared in 2011, Rowson says he’s seen curiosity develop amongst a variety of industries.
“It’s really interesting to watch that industries are very engaged in what we do,” Rowson says. “They’re interested, they’re listening, (and) we’re collaborating with them.”
Ultimately, a helmet is “a safety product and it should be held accountable to how safe it is,” he provides. “People care when you’re buying a helmet, how much protection it offers. So, when we started publicizing that information, it was like a light bulb to manufacturers: ‘safety sells’ … and we’ve seen that across just about every single area we’ve evaluated helmets in.”