Inside the Helmet Lab at Virginia Tech - Where Research Meets Real World Impact 09-08-2025

Explore the biomechanics of skull and brain injuries with Steven Rowson, PhD, director of the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab, as he and Rachann discuss how the groundbreaking work of the lab has innovated the STAR (Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risk) rating system, providing data to helmet manufacturers to improve helmet safety for various sports.

Virginia Tech Helmet Lab

The Maryland Horse Council

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RCP Podcast Helmet Lab at VT Total.mp3

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We're raising some connections today.

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Dr.

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Stephen Ralston, PhD, is joining us from the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab.

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It's a combination of practical knowledge, applied knowledge, and some good old-fashioned physics, talking about what's rattling around in there, your brain, and the outside of it, the skull, and the helmet that goes on top of it, how does it protect, and what's new?

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Helmets from 2011 to 2025, there's been big changes.

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Join us on Raising Connections.

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I direct the Regina Tech Helmet Lab.

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The helmet ratings are one of our translational outputs of the lab, but we do all kinds of research.

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Our pet care with a personal touch is not just a motto, it's really what we do.

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us anytime on our Facebook page, Moriah Bell Manor Kennel or moriahbellmanorkennel.com.

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Enjoy your program.

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Welcome to Raising Connections, connecting your community to others through Critters, Companions, Commerce and Agriculture.

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I'm Rae Shann Mayer.

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Let's raise some connections.

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Here we go.

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Today, as always, we have a fun and interesting guest, Stephen Rowson, PhD.

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Good morning.

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Thanks for having me.

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What is your position and your function at Virginia Tech?

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I'm a professor of biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech, and I'm director of the Helmet Lab.

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The Helmet Lab is an injury biomechanics research lab where we try to figure out the forces that cause injury to the human body.

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We then take that information and try to figure out how we could use it to help people through translational research.

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We run the Virginia Tech Helmet Ratings, which is one of those translational

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outputs.

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What do you mean when you say translational?

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I consider our lab having two research arms.

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The first is more towards basic science, where we're really in the weeds of trying to figure out what's the mechanism of injury in this specific scenario, what are the tolerable forces, and how do we model risk?

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And to most people, that doesn't mean a whole lot.

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But we can take it a step further and translate it for the public, for consumers, where we take everything that we learn and package it in a way that people

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people can use it to make informed decisions when looking to buy safety equipment like helmets.

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How did you get interested in this field of study?

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Way back in 2006, I visited Virginia Tech looking at grad schools, and I met Stefan Duma here, and he was about to start a new project where they were sticking sensors inside the helmets of football players.

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And at the time, this was all geared towards automotive safety, because we typically don't have a great way of studying brain injury in the laboratory.

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We can't bring

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someone into the lab, hit him in the head and see what happens, right?

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So the idea was, well, if we put sensors in high-risk populations, like football players, we can collect data.

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on potential head injuries in an ethical and natural manner.

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These football players are going to hit their heads anyway.

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We might as well collect data on it.

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And over time, we were able to capture enough data to characterize the biomechanics of concussion.

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And all that work was funded by the automotive industry.

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The Department of Transportation and Toyota provided a lot of the early funding for that work because it was thought, if we understand the onset of brain injury that these football players are experiencing, we can design cars around that to help prevent brain injuries.

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Ultimately, that

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It led down a path of kind of a sport-specific application because we learned so much about how football players hit their heads that it made a lot of sense for us to start to look at helmets.

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The auto industry and the football sporting events, I would think that the physics and how that impact and the head trauma occurs would be slightly different.

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I think of the headrest behind us or a time when there was not a headrest behind us in the automobiles versus two bodies in motion running at each other's shoulders.

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Does that method of motion come into this?

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There's several mechanisms of brain injury and skull fracture.

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So when we say head injury, that could be an injury to the skull or it could be an injury to the brain.

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Sometimes it's both.

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And there's different mechanisms to produce those types of injuries.

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While there are specific scenarios in the automotive industry, like a rear impact that's going to differ from what we see in football, there's also a lot of overlap.

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Like if your head hits the side pillar or goes forward into a steering wheel or hits some other object, there's a lot

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lot of similarities between that type of head impact and what we see in sports.

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And the things you are considering in your study are head injuries, not neck injuries.

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Well, as a lab, we look at injury all over the body.

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So we've done neck work, we've done brain work, we've done facial fracture work.

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So when we say injury biomechanics, it's comprehensive and holistic to the body.

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Our primary focus, however, is brain injury because brain injury is one of the leading causes of traumatic deaths that we see, not necessarily neck injuries.

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You're more likely to have a brain injury than a severe neck injury, especially in sports.

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So it makes sense to focus on how do we better prevent this brain stretching mechanism during these head impacts through helmet technology.

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A traumatic brain injury injures the brain, not the skull.

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Is a concussion a traumatic brain injury?

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It's a form of traumatic brain injury.

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We would call it a mild traumatic brain injury.

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But when we think of a type of concussions that we see, they happen on a continuum and a scale with the severity of head impact.

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Let me describe real quick what happens when you hit your head.

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You have a head impact, it interacts with your skull.

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with or without a helmet.

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So the helmet might be the interface or it might be the object directly impacting your skull.

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Your skull suddenly accelerates.

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So you get a sudden change in velocity of the skull, but your brain is not rigidly attached to your skull and it has its own mass.

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So it has a tendency to want to stay in place.

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And what that leads to is kind of a complex brain tissue response where the skull starts to rotate around the brain.

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The brain motion lags and eventually catches up, but kind of that differential motion between the skull and the brain causes the brain tissue to stretch and can produce diffuse injuries throughout the brain tissue.

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At the levels we see in sports, we most typically see a concussion, which is a lower severity, but it may be a high-speed impact, like in the automotive industry.

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It's just an exaggeration of this motion.

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where we have more severe stretching due to a higher magnitude acceleration that could produce more serious forms of traumatic brain injury.

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The skull is just another place for our brain to hit.

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Sure, I don't think of it as so much hitting your skull.

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I think about it as like supporting your skull because there's not a lot of extra space inside.

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If you ever open up a head, hopefully you don't.

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But if you do, there's not a whole lot of extra space in there.

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So when we talk about the brain motion inside the skull, it typically happens in a rotational manner, and it almost takes the form of a figure eight loop, but the magnitude of movement that we see is only on the order of seven millimeters.

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So we're talking about a tiny, tiny bit of motion, but it's enough to produce an injury response in the brain tissue.

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And it's the swelling.

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That is one of the problems that happens as the result of a traumatic brain injury or a fall and impact.

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That's right.

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We could have swelling and bleeding, and anytime you're adding extra fluid inside the skull, you're increasing pressure and it does not have good outcomes.

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So in the colloquialisms, when someone says what's rattling around in your head, it's a very small space in which to rattle.

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And if it becomes impactful, meaning something's hit you or you've hit something, the injuries can be life-changing and life-altering depending on the type of injury that's sustained.

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That's correct.

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And there is why the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab has produced their most recent paper, and that's what we're here to talk about.

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We understand that as a graduate student, you came to be involved with the lab.

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You found Stephan Dumas, and you were involved with the lab.

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You've gone through the ranks.

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You apparently did very well in graduate school.

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You've attained your PhD, and you opted to stay at the lab at work.

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Why?

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Well, I love what we do, and it's such interesting work, and it has such a big impact.

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It's very rare that I think you get to do research and make it directly useful to people.

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Normally, it's just one part of a long

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process, both through the number of steps and duration of seeing a research idea come to reality.

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Here we're doing applied research specific to sports, where we can look at specific populations, characterize what they're experiencing, and then figure out ways that we can reduce risk and thus the occurrence of injury.

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So we've looked at this in all kinds of different areas, from football to hockey to equestrian sports, snow sports, and we're about to release occupational

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protection, like what happens in a workplace when someone hits their head.

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So we have this framework that we can apply to a number of different problems to really help people, and I find that rewarding.

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The equine industry is a $3 billion financial impact in the state of Maryland.

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That's a lot of money.

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Nationally, in your study, you cite 3 million people riding horses in the United States, and sometimes, 50,000 times, those activities result in an emergency room visit, and a percentage of those result in a

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head injury.

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In the communities, there are helmet laws, helmet recommendations.

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Much like in the motorcycle world, there are recommendations and there are laws.

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Some states have helmet laws, some states don't.

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We're not here to talk about how those laws are carried out, but to provide information around helmet safety.

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My personal experience with this was I wasn't even on the horse.

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I was starting to get on a horse, and I ended up coming in contact with the ground at an implant time, we'll say.

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My first response was

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tell the first responders when they ask, Did you hit your head?

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My answer was, I had a helmet on.

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But a brain injury can happen inside of a helmet.

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That's right.

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Helmets reduce risk.

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They don't prevent all injuries.

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They are good at reducing the severity of injury, especially depending on helmet design.

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But the difference between wearing a helmet and not wearing a helmet could be the difference between life and death and some of the impacts that we're looking at.

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When we think about a rating, it's not a standard.

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We only test helmets that pass the standards required for whichever helmet we're looking at.

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So we look at ourselves as supplemental information to the mandated safety standard that these helmets go through.

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So with that said, our role in this space, because a standard is pass/fail, meaning you'll do a series of tests in the lab,

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Typically, we drop a head with a helmet on it onto some surface, and we measure the head acceleration.

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And if that head acceleration's below some threshold, the helmet's considered to be safe enough to be worn, and it's just a pass.

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So when you look at a helmet, you'll see what standards it's certified to, but it doesn't give you any indication if helmet A has better performance than helmet B and how those compare to helmet C.

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So that's where we fill the space.

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We do real-world research.

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We look at the impact conditions that people experience.

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We replicate those in the lab in a controlled manner, and we test all the helmets the same way.

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We measure the type of head accelerations that are experienced during those impacts.

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We know how they relate to risk of brain injury, and then we

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summarize that information in a way so people could see how helmet A compares to helmet B and so forth.

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And that allows them to identify if they're interested, the helmets at best going to reduce risk for them.

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Can you give us an idea of, are you looking for, does the helmet break?

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Are there biofeedbacks within the model head that's being used to fill the helmet space?

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What sort of data are you looking for?

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What sort of standards are you looking for?

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When we test the helmet in a lab, we have a crash dummy head form, essentially.

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And inside that head form, there's sensors that measure linear motion.

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They're called accelerometers.

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So we're quantifying acceleration about each axis of the head.

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And we also have sensors that quantify

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rotation of the head.

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Those are angular rate sensors, so they measure rotational velocity of the head.

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And then we can compute rotational acceleration from those measurements.

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Those two types of measurements both represent mechanisms of brain injury, and combined, they contribute to brain injury risk.

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So those are the two primary outcome measures that we're looking at from each drop test.

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And then I have statistical models based on real-world data where we took head impact data using sensors from football

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players and some other populations to quantify, well, given this linear acceleration and this rotational acceleration, there's this probability of brain injury.

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So we translate our laboratory measurements to a probability of injury, and then we weight each test condition based on how often people actually see it.

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The difference between a risk factor, which you're studying in the laboratory, to design and work with, is efficacy the right word to use here for helmet design, versus the translational piece of how the helmet works for each sport?

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Are those the same risk factors and same studies, or are they different studies?

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For all our helmet rating programs, we use a single tool.

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To translate, the linear and rotational accelerations that we measure in a dummy head is some probability of injury.

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We call that a risk function.

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And that risk function was developed from football player data.

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Football players experience head impacts that are very similar to a lot of other types of head impacts that we see across all sports.

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So it forms the basis for our hockey ratings, our bicycle helmet ratings, and even our equestion ratings, and how we take those acceleration measurements, which don't mean a whole lot to most people,

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and transform it into a probability of injury.

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That probability of injury or the risk factor, if we are looking at purchasing a helmet, is that something that we're going to be interested in finding out?

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Or is that something that the manufacturers of the helmets are going to look that data up and design their helmet and then market it to the consumer?

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Well, the purpose of the risk function is really to identify what decreases in acceleration are meaningful.

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One of the things we always say, and it's kind of the ethos of the helmet rating system, is that lower acceleration equals lower risk.

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And that's the tool that we use.

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So the manufacturers can get information from us at the risk level.

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We summarize it because we normally have more than one test that we do.

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summarize it for consumers into an overall score, which takes a bunch of different risk values because we might test like the front, side, and back, maybe somewhere in between, depending on the helmet rating system that we're using.

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And we need to take all those tests and summarize it in a way representative of overall helmet performance.

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So the risk values that I'm talking about, it's an internal tool that we use and it's part of the translational process, but it's not the end product.

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There is the study piece and the piece of the helmet lab that provides this high-level technical data to other engineers, I would assume.

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working to develop safe helmets for consumers.

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That data that also gets applied to the consumer purchasing the helmet.

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And my guess is that data also gets provided to folks who are making laws and safety and health and occupational environmental decisions.

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It trickles down to so many folks.

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In order for us to understand this, can you walk me through the types of study that you're doing?

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So it is rotational, it is head impact,

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you're taking these models, they have sensors in them, you're collecting data from football players and from the auto industry, which makes the G-Force important.

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How fast are you going when this happens?

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And yet, horses aren't going as fast as an automobile, or maybe they aren't doing some of the activities that a motorcycle is doing, but yet it's really relevant to understand how the horse is moving so that you can understand what the head would be doing inside of a helmet.

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Do I have that put together right?

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For the most part.

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When we think about the data from football players, that's just a tool in our toolbox that we use as part of how we evaluate head protection.

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And it's the same way that if you look at every single helmet standard that exists today,

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whether it's a football helmet standard or the equestrian helmet standards.

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Those are all based on a data set of cadaver head drops where they would drop cadaver heads in the lab and see whether or not there was a skull fracture.

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And they have a threshold set off those tests and every single helmet safety standards based on those.

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So that's like their tool set.

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One of the conversations we had off air, it was just mind-blowing.

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There are several different rating systems.

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The testing for that data

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happened not only a while ago, but also with different mechanisms that are currently available.

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Can you give us an outline of that?

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Sure.

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I think one of the biggest challenges in safety assessment is how do we make a measurement in the lab and relate that to some injury outcome.

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There's not a lot of data that exists.

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Our helmet ratings are based on data.

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data we collected from athletes and looked at the head impacts and whether or not there was a concussion.

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But if we think about the safety standards that all helmets have to pass, they are based on cadaver tests.

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And what that means is that if we drop this head from our test kit

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conditions, the acceleration measured inside that dummy head form cannot exceed 300 G's because 300 G's is the threshold that was determined from a series of cadaver tests that were done.

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way back in the '60s, and could delineate tests with skull fracture versus tests without.

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So the small set of cadaver tests that were done in the 1960s formed the basis of every head injury safety standard that exists.

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That's true for helmets, the football helmet safety standards based on that, equestrian helmet, bicycle helmet, but that's also true in other industries.

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The automotive industry also relies on this data, and their head injury limits come from the same set of cadaver tests.

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When we look at a rating, we're really trying to understand how people hit their heads.

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So we do sport-specific research.

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And with equestrian ratings, we did a lot of video analysis, watching people fall off horses, noting how they hit their heads.

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And that includes things like figuring out.

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What was the impact speed or what height did they fall from?

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Was it high energy hit?

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Was it low energy hit?

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What part of the helmet was impacted?

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We take information like that and then we'll build test equipment in the lab to replicate the head impacts that we see.

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We know that an equestrian rider might hit their head on dirt or grass.

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We looked at, well, what's the head impact response when our dummy hits those surfaces?

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Then how do we replicate that in the laboratory to make sure we're having a meaningful hit in the lab?

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Our goal is to really capture how people are

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getting heard in the real world.

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And that's all sports specific.

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So we hit our equestrian helmets different than we hit our bicycle helmets.

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And then we do a bunch of tests of common impact scenarios, package that all up and share that in a number of ways.

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We have our website where we share consumer facing data that summarizes these complex tests.

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And then we have data packages that we share with the manufacturers so they can understand how their helmets did and identify areas that they might want to improve.

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When we come back, let's continue

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this conversation about protecting our heads.

00:19:39 Speaker 1

Welcome back to Raising Connections.

00:19:41 Speaker 1

Today we're talking about helmet safety with Stephen Rowson, Virginia Tech Helmet Lab.

00:19:47 Speaker 1

45 different helmets were evaluated in the current study.

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Was price factor considered when the helmets were evaluated?

00:19:57 Speaker 2

Well, we try to purchase helmets that have a range of costs.

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We try to capture the market.

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Over time, our goal is to test every helmet that's available to consumers, but that takes some time.

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So like our initial releases, we get a representative sample.

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In this case, we're up to 45 helmets with equestrian.

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Cycling, for example, we have over 270 helmets rated, and it just takes time.

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So as helmets come out, and this happens monthly, maybe every other month, we buy the helmet

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that are available in the market and we start testing to it, continuing to update it.

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The goal of capturing everything.

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But when we first release a rating, we're trying to get low-cost helmets, expensive helmets, and we look a little bit about, do we see any kind of relationship between cost and performance?

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And almost always, when we're first releasing a rating, the answer is no.

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We have inexpensive helmets towards the top, we have expensive helmets towards the top, and we have both those at the bottom too.

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So it's just a lot of noise and these things are priced based on other features of the helmet and not necessarily safety.

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Over time, what we've seen in other sports, and that hasn't necessarily happened in equestrian yet, is that we start to see costs be more representative of performance because the manufacturers start using the ratings as another piece of marketing to

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to advertise how safe their helmet is.

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So if they have a high performing helmet, they start to think they could charge more for it.

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I don't know if that's working out in terms of sales, but it's a pattern that we've noticed.

00:21:28 Speaker 1

Interesting.

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Consumer awareness.

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Why is it important to replace our helmets, one, as they age, and two, after an impact?

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Well, there's a few reasons for that.

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And if we start with replacing your helmet after an impact, it depends on the type of helmet it is.

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In the equestrian world, it's really important because these helmets will

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permanently deform with severe head impact.

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If you hit your head really hard and the helmet works, that foam liner inside should crush.

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And if it crushes, it doesn't go back to its typical state.

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So you pretty much get permanent deformation of the helmet.

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And if you were to ever hit that same impact location on the helmet, it wouldn't perform at

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it was designed to, because the foam would have lost some of its capacity to crush.

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And by not being able to crush, rather than manage that impact energy in the helmet, it's going to transfer it to the head and increase your risk of injury.

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So that's the primary concern there.

00:22:24 Speaker 2

Sometimes if you see shell damage, you know it's a very severe head impact and the shell's not structurally sound anymore.

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But it's mainly due to concern if you hit the same spot on the helmet, it's going to not perform as well as it should.

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Why should you replace your helmet over time?

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There's a couple of reasons for that.

00:22:42 Speaker 2

The first being, well, the helmets, if they're in the sun all the time, UV exposure can degrade some of the materials on the helmet, helmet showing particularly.

00:22:52 Speaker 2

Beyond that is another good reason.

00:22:54 Speaker 2

If you're sweating a lot in a helmet, they can get pretty gross inside.

00:22:57 Speaker 2

They sure can.

00:22:58 Speaker 2

And there's not great ways to clean it, and you probably should clean it, but you got to be careful about what type of cleaners you use inside, and that would depend on the type of material.

00:23:06 Speaker 2

So it's something to think about as you clean your helmet.

00:23:09 Speaker 2

But the third reason is if you buy a helmet, and I think we're in this really cool time where everyone's worried about how do we best protect ourselves from head injury, manufacturers are releasing new innovative designs all the time.

00:23:22 Speaker 2

If you have a helmet and you wait a couple of years, two, three, four, five years, and you look at the helmets that are available since you bought your helmet, there might be huge leaps in the protection that they offer.

00:23:34 Speaker 2

So while you might have bought something good when you got your helmet, there might be a

00:23:39 Speaker 2

financial increase in performance available.

00:23:41 Speaker 2

And if you're interested in that, would be another consideration in that decision-making process.

00:23:46 Speaker 1

So we need to keep our shoes and our tread good.

00:23:48 Speaker 1

We need to keep our bodies in shape and our heads protected and enjoy our sports.

00:23:53 Speaker 2

That's right.

00:23:55 Speaker 1

When you talk about the rating systems, there is the MIPS, there's the Multidirectional Impact Protection System, and there's the Equine Star rating.

00:24:04 Speaker 1

Help us figure these things out.

00:24:06 Speaker 2

Sure.

00:24:06 Speaker 2

The star rating is the end result of our testing in the laboratory.

00:24:11 Speaker 2

So again, the star is the formula that we use to generalize our data, to summarize our data in a way that's easily interpretable for everyone.

00:24:22 Speaker 2

It's based on the same concepts, the automotive

00:24:25 Speaker 2

reused.

00:24:25 Speaker 2

So if you go look at a sticker in a new car on the dealership lot, you'll see a star rating on it representative of its crashworthiness.

00:24:33 Speaker 2

So what's the risk to occupants in the event of a front and side and oblique impact in the car?

00:24:39 Speaker 2

We took those concepts and applied it to helmets.

00:24:41 Speaker 2

And that's what the star rating system is.

00:24:43 Speaker 2

So if you look on our website, you'll see there's five-star helmets, there's four-star helmets, there's three stars.

00:24:48 Speaker 2

The more stars you have, the better the performance of the helmet and the lower the risk.

00:24:53 Speaker 2

When we talk about MIPS,

00:24:55 Speaker 2

That is a technology that goes inside some helmets.

00:24:59 Speaker 2

So it's a company that makes helmet technology, and some helmet manufacturers will license that technology and integrate into their helmets.

00:25:06 Speaker 2

MIPS, at its core function, works as a slip plane, so a low friction interface between the head and the helmet that allows the helmet to rotate around the head.

00:25:16 Speaker 2

So this slip plane, MIPS, that goes inside helmets tends to perform really well in oblique impacts, and we see that in our data.

00:25:25 Speaker 2

So our ratings highlight where it performs well.

00:25:28 Speaker 1

Using the MIPS system, understanding friction, understanding the lateral impact coming at us in the front, the oblique impact that we've talked

00:25:36 Speaker 1

about?

00:25:37 Speaker 1

This seems like a very simple question, but I have to admit it's at the forefront of my mind and I bet some of our listeners have it there too.

00:25:44 Speaker 1

The MIPS system, what you were saying, is it how the head and the helmet and the gear in the helmet, the technology in the helmet interact?

00:25:52 Speaker 1

Oftentimes I will see end users put a handkerchief over their head or a baseball cap over their head or something between their head and the helmet for various reasons.

00:26:03 Speaker 1

Does this impact

00:26:05 Speaker 1

the usefulness or the effectiveness of a helmet?

00:26:08 Speaker 2

I'd say overall, not in a hugely meaningful way.

00:26:12 Speaker 2

So in some impact scenarios, it might affect the response, but the helmet's still going to perform well.

00:26:19 Speaker 2

When we think about overall helmet performance, the number one dictator of its performance is typically the foam liner that exists in the helmet.

00:26:28 Speaker 2

And the purpose of that foam liner is to crush.

00:26:30 Speaker 2

So by deforming the material, the helmet liner, it's

00:26:35 Speaker 2

managing impact energy.

00:26:37 Speaker 2

As it crushes, it extends the duration of that force impulse that's being experienced, but lowers the peak value, so the peak measurement that you might see.

00:26:47 Speaker 2

And that is the basis of how we generally reduce injury risk to any part of the body.

00:26:52 Speaker 2

You know, if you think about something else breaking rather than your body, that's a good thing.

00:26:56 Speaker 2

So the energy's going into deforming or crushing the liner.

00:26:59 Speaker 2

When we think about MIPS, I think of it as an enhancement.

00:27:02 Speaker 2

So the baseline performance of the helmet is

00:27:05 Speaker 2

rotated by the foaming side.

00:27:06 Speaker 2

And then if you wanted to further enhance that, you can add additional technology like MIPS, MIPS is one example, that targets impact energy in a different way, such as rotation, and allows the head to maybe experience less rotational acceleration in certain types of impacts.

00:27:23 Speaker 2

It doesn't work as well in all scenarios.

00:27:25 Speaker 2

For example, in a direct or linear impact, the direction of force is through the center of the head, we generally don't see a huge effect of whether or not there's MIPS in there or not.

00:27:35 Speaker 2

And I wouldn't expect to see any difference if someone else is wearing something on their head, like a bandana, for instance.

00:27:40 Speaker 2

In an oblique impact, it becomes a little more important, where it's actually trying to rotate the helmet around the head.

00:27:47 Speaker 2

So if you're changing the frictional interface between the head and the helmet, it will have some effect.

00:27:53 Speaker 2

The extent of that is really variable.

00:27:55 Speaker 2

It depends on the materials.

00:27:56 Speaker 2

Even the type of hair someone has can affect the head impact response in that scenario.

00:28:01 Speaker 1

That leads me to the next question.

00:28:04 Speaker 1

When I go to the hair

00:28:05 Speaker 1

dresser when many of us go online and say, What sort of hairstyle would look best on my face shape?

00:28:10 Speaker 1

The face shape is a direct reflection of the head and skull shape.

00:28:14 Speaker 1

Are there different helmets for different shaped heads?

00:28:18 Speaker 2

There are.

00:28:18 Speaker 2

Each helmet has a little bit different fit.

00:28:20 Speaker 2

Most helmets are molded around standard head forms.

00:28:25 Speaker 2

It varies by industry, but sometimes we see helmets designed to fit different shaped heads.

00:28:31 Speaker 2

So picking a helmet that's comfortable for someone's head shape is really

00:28:35 Speaker 2

important because ultimately you want that person to wear the helmet.

00:28:38 Speaker 2

That's the most important decision anyone can make, whether to wear a helmet or not.

00:28:42 Speaker 2

How good that helmet is is secondary to it because the difference between wearing a helmet and not can be the difference between life and death.

00:28:49 Speaker 2

So finding a helmet that's comfortable, that fits someone's head shape is really important because they'd be encouraged to wear it.

00:28:55 Speaker 2

It wouldn't be a burden to wear.

00:28:56 Speaker 2

So trying these on and understanding what fits your head, I think is part of the decision process for everyone buying a helmet.

00:29:04 Speaker 1

When we're looking at purchasing a helmet, how do we know what fits?

00:29:07 Speaker 1

How tight is too tight?

00:29:09 Speaker 1

How loose is too loose?

00:29:11 Speaker 1

How do we know what fits?

00:29:12 Speaker 2

It's really based on comfort and something you feel is going to stay on your head during a fall event.

00:29:18 Speaker 2

So when you're looking at a helmet, there's a lot of things to consider.

00:29:21 Speaker 2

People are going to consider costs, they're going to consider looks, they're going to consider fit, and they're going to consider safety performance.

00:29:28 Speaker 2

And then depending on

00:29:29 Speaker 2

what specific type of helmet you're looking at, there might be other considerations like, does this helmet have vents because I'm worried about being hot?

00:29:36 Speaker 2

So when we think about fit, the most important thing for fit is that the helmet stays in place during an hour.

00:29:42 Speaker 2

accident because you want that helmet to be between you and whatever your head's about to hit.

00:29:47 Speaker 2

That's how the helmet works.

00:29:49 Speaker 2

So it needs to be good enough to do that.

00:29:50 Speaker 2

If a helmet's too tight, that's not going to be comfortable and your head's probably not going to feel good at the end of the day.

00:29:56 Speaker 2

If it's too loose, it might move around on your head.

00:29:59 Speaker 2

But you know it when you feel it.

00:30:01 Speaker 2

Like if the helmet's not rattling around your head and it's not squeezing your head and your chin straps on right,

00:30:06 Speaker 2

helmet's going to be there.

00:30:07 Speaker 2

Fit doesn't have a huge effect on performance.

00:30:10 Speaker 2

So like if the helmet moves around a little, that's not a huge deal as long as it's staying generally in place.

00:30:16 Speaker 2

The primary tool that people use to assess injury outcome from a series of tests in the lab are

00:30:24 Speaker 2

Our data don't look at skull fracture our data looks at concussion risk, so we have a similar tool where we quantify the concussion risk in athletes based on head impact measurements.

00:30:34 Speaker 1

Given where the industry's been and the data with the skull fractures setting a standard, because it was the first thing off the line.

00:30:42 Speaker 1

And moving forward into concussion, where do you see the future of helmet safety and helmet technology moving?

00:30:49 Speaker 2

Well, I think it's really variable by sport.

00:30:51 Speaker 2

I think for the first time, we're starting to get really good information on the way people are getting hurt in the real world.

00:30:59 Speaker 2

There's a lot of research quantifying boundary conditions of head impact.

00:31:02 Speaker 2

What I mean by boundary conditions is how hard are they hitting their head?

00:31:06 Speaker 2

What locations on the helmet are they hitting?

00:31:07 Speaker 2

What's the direction of force?

00:31:09 Speaker 2

And then we look at things like, well, how do we replicate that in the lab?

00:31:13 Speaker 2

So if you look at most helmet safety standards, they're all pretty similar to one another where you have a linear drop onto what's known as an anvil, which is just a hard surface.

00:31:25 Speaker 2

acceleration of the falling head form during the impact and make sure that's below the limit set by those cadaver tests I just mentioned.

00:31:33 Speaker 2

So normally that's around 300 Gs.

00:31:35 Speaker 2

And sometimes that's expressed in different ways, but it's kind of all the same thing.

00:31:39 Speaker 2

So for these impact conditions, there needs to be enough foam or crushable material or deformable material in the helmet to limit linear head acceleration below the threshold required to be considered safe.

00:31:51 Speaker 2

When we start thinking about brain injury, it's a different ballpark.

00:31:54 Speaker 2

We think about brain

00:31:55 Speaker 2

injury on a continuum, and that could be from mild injuries like concussion all the way up to severe injuries like DAI.

00:32:01 Speaker 2

And we start to think about things like risk compared to a threshold.

00:32:05 Speaker 2

So there's no pass-fail when we start thinking about helmet ratings.

00:32:09 Speaker 2

I think we're starting to see scenarios where manufacturers are giving new design criteria that they could start to optimize for.

00:32:16 Speaker 2

And we've seen that in other sports that we've been doing for a longer time.

00:32:20 Speaker 2

So if we look at football helmets, when we first released football helmets, we had one five-star helmet.

00:32:25 Speaker 2

Everything else was rated below that.

00:32:27 Speaker 2

The manufacturers didn't like it.

00:32:29 Speaker 2

They complained, they criticized, but what they saw is that the ratings really resonated with the public because it was the first time they saw independent data that

00:32:39 Speaker 2

they could use to compare helmet performance.

00:32:41 Speaker 2

And people started buying better performing helmets.

00:32:44 Speaker 2

And the manufacturers had to react and they started designing helmets that tested better in the lab.

00:32:50 Speaker 2

Not helmets that just passed the standard, but also performed well on this continuum rating that we do.

00:32:57 Speaker 2

And right now, just about every helmet that comes on the marketing football is rated as five stars.

00:33:02 Speaker 2

They are orders of magnitude better than what was available when first released helmets.

00:33:07 Speaker 2

The best football helmet

00:33:09 Speaker 2

in 2011 would be the worst football helmet today.

00:33:12 Speaker 2

That's how far football helmets have come.

00:33:14 Speaker 2

So we hope that in these other sports that we're more recently getting into, we start to see the same kind of change because this is an engineering problem.

00:33:24 Speaker 2

There's design criteria based on real world head injuries and impact events, and there's a real opportunity to optimize helmet design.

00:33:32 Speaker 2

So I think you're going to start to see.

00:33:34 Speaker 2

more differences in the designs that are available, helmets that maybe aren't as stiff in the inside, or they have dual density foams, or they integrate different rotation mechanisms.

00:33:45 Speaker 2

But there's a lot of opportunity for innovation.

00:33:47 Speaker 2

You wouldn't necessarily have thought that same thing with football.

00:33:49 Speaker 2

And if you look at the technology today,

00:33:52 Speaker 2

It's amazing what they've done in the past 10 years.

00:33:54 Speaker 2

It's more progress than you probably saw in the previous 30.

00:33:57 Speaker 2

And what's even cooler about that is that these newer helmets are being associated with lower injury risks and injury rates in the real world.

00:34:05 Speaker 2

So like when people look at players wearing helmet A versus helmet B on the field and looking at concussion rates, you're seeing differences that align with laboratory tests.

00:34:14 Speaker 2

These changes could be really meaningful.

00:34:16 Speaker 1

Very practical application, very translatable.

00:34:19 Speaker 1

If we want to learn more information about

00:34:22 Speaker 1

your studies and the rating systems and helmet information in general.

00:34:27 Speaker 1

Where do we find your laboratory and what is a good resource?

00:34:31 Speaker 2

You could find our helmet ratings and links to all our research studies at our website, which is vt.edu/helmet.

00:34:39 Speaker 1

Dr.

00:34:39 Speaker 1

Steven Rouson, Virginia Tech Helmet Lab.

00:34:42 Speaker 1

Thank you for joining us and thank you for doing this work and coming to share it with all of our listeners.

00:34:46 Speaker 2

Awesome.

00:34:46 Speaker 2

I appreciate it.

00:34:47 Speaker 2

Thanks for having me.

00:34:50 Speaker 1

I hope the connections we've raised today stay with you as you engage your community through critters, companions, commerce, and agriculture.

00:34:57 Speaker 1

Join me again next week.

00:34:59 Speaker 1

We'll make some more connections.

00:35:01 Speaker 1

This program is a production of Raising Connections Media Company, hosted and produced by Rashan Mayer and edited and mixed by Robin Temple.

00:35:09 Speaker 1

For more information about our programs, visit raisingconnections.com.