In 2011, the Virginia Tech helmet research lab released its first rating system for football helmets. Since then, the research team and the lab have received national recognition for their helmet rating systems to reduce head injuries in the sports world.
Located on the basement level of Kelly Hall, the Virginia Tech helmet research lab was built as a way for researchers to study the biomechanics of concussion.
“If we can understand what forces cause concussion we can work to design things to prevent injuries from happening,” said Steven Rowson, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics in the College of Engineering and the director of the helmet research lab.
The research team works with Virginia Tech athletes on the field and measures the head impact the athletes receive with their helmets on. The research team then maps the data from the field to the lab and develops criteria for helmet rating systems based on the data.
“If you are going to wear one, it’s like all other protections: Some are really good, some aren’t very good,” said Stefan Duma, the Harry Wyatt Professor of Engineering and interim director of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science. “We want to give consumers and players a way to know.”
Whenever a new helmet comes to the market, the research team purchases two samples of the helmet and runs repeated tests. After that, the researchers aggregate all the information and results gathered from the tests and give the helmet a star rating.
According to Duma, it takes at least 48 tests in order to complete the rating for one helmet.
The general process to evaluate a helmet is similar for all sports. However, the researchers develop specific circumstances for different sports.
“I always tell people that, you know, the first couple hundred helmet tests are fun,” Duma said. “The next several thousands are really boring.”
According to Duma, when the lab was first set up in 2011, the focus of the lab was on impact biomechanics, especially auto safety. On the floor of the lab, there are still holes, which were once used for slides for simulating car crashes.
In 2009, Duma and his team received a phone call from Lester Karlin, football equipment manager for the Virginia Tech football team, asking which helmet the Virginia Tech football players should wear on the field.
“That’s when we started looking at them,” Duma said. “We realized that there wasn’t anything out there, and it was a huge unknown for consumers.”
In 2011, the research team released the first rating system for football helmets. After that, the lab shifted its focus to injury biomechanics.
In the next few years, the lab expanded, and started to test and analyze helmets in other sports. So far, the research team is testing the helmets used in football, hockey, soccer, bicycling, lacrosse, baseball, softball, construction and head impact sensors.
“Any kind of head protection, we are looking to evaluate. The idea behind that is (to) allow consumers to make and form decisions when purchasing helmets,” Rowson said. “Before our ratings, there was never any data that someone can look to to say one helmet is better than the other.”
The research team consists of several university professors and graduate students. The researchers are divided into several groups with each group focusing on one sport. In addition, the lab runs an undergraduate program, which hires undergraduate students to help analyze data and run impact tests.
The helmet research lab has a K–12 outreach program, which teaches kids about basic biomechanics and engineering.
“Almost every week, we’ll have some grade school and high school classes through here. We developed experiments. In this case, we developed what we called ‘build a helmet,’” Duma said. “Kids have shells. They put in pads. They test them on this device. They lift it up, and have an impact. They compete against each other to build the best helmet. We teach them about engineering.”
The lab is currently working with National Institutes of Health (NIH) on a youth helmet study. The research team is collecting data from kids at the age of 10 or 11 in the town of Blacksburg and the Blacksburg Middle School football team to study how to make the game safer for young kids.
According to Duma, the helmet ratings helped helmet manufacturers develop better helmets.
Rowson said the research team will add more measures into the rating system or change the rating systems in the future to help the manufacturers develop safer helmets to better protect athletes on the field.
“Basically, the analogy is to say yeah, hopefully, with our five star helmets, we will start to look at more finer differences and maybe be able to show consumers OK, this five star helmet is still better than this, and maybe change the star rating result,” said Megan Bland, a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech and a graduate research assistant in the helmet lab.
Duma described that the success of the lab comes from two things: science and independence.
“I always tell people two things have made our lab very successful. The first is the science. We have very solid science and everything is peered reviewed and published, very very detailed analysis of why we do what we are doing, but the second thing is we are very independent,” Duma said. “We don’t make a helmet. We don’t have ip on any helmet. We don’t do that on purpose, because we don’t want to be influenced to promote one helmet over the other.”
The detailed analyses of each helmet and all the work at the lab are peer reviewed and published.
Despite the amount of research and testing that took place in the lab, the helmet research lab will not be producing its own helmets in order to be unbiased and avoid a conflict of interest.
“We can only do one thing, and our primary focus is research. If we were to evaluate helmets, and then we work to make our own helmet, and when our own rating and our own helmet does best, there is a conflict of interest,” Rowson said.” It would both discredit our helmet and our rating at the same time.”
Sursa: collegiatetimes.com