While the NFL always seems to be a step behind player safety, especially when it comes to head injuries, researches at the college level are diligently working towards better equipment. Virgina Tech recently released the results of its 2013 adult football helmet ratings. These ratings are to determine the abilities of different helmets in reducing the risk of concussions.
This rating system was created in 2011 and includes analysis of over 2 million head impacts recorded at the high school and college level.
"It is encouraging to see the progress in helmet design over the past two years. We were able to utilize funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to collect data that provided the foundation for this translational research. In addition to the high performing Riddell and Rawlings helmets of last year, you saw Xenith, SG, and Schutt all introduce new helmets this year that are performing very well," said project director Stefan Duma, the Harry C. Wyatt Professor and Department Head of the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (SBES).
Meanwhile at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, scientists revealed a new metric to measure cumulative hits in football, and the risk of of concussion. The metric, Risk Weighted Cumulative Exposure (RWE) can predict the risk of concussion based on frequency and magnitude of hits. The researchers have used RWE to measure not only the cumulative risk of injury, but the probability of injury as well.
Says Joel Stitzel, Ph.D., chair of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest Baptist, "This metric gives us a way to look at a large number of players and the hits they've incurred while playing football. We know that young players are constantly experiencing low-level hits that don't cause visible injury, but there hasn't been a good way to measure the associated risk of concussion."
Concussions are the most common sports-related head injury, with football players of course leading the pack in the type of sport being played. Researchers used sensors placed in helmets to record 16,502 impacts, which were analyzed in group and individual formats. The goal here being to not only predict, but work on a forum to begin the process of changing the paradigm of the game to lesson the impact on the head. Brain injuries are a major risk of multiple concussions, preventing them should be at the forefront of football related research. The team hopes that this research will help improve helmet safety and make football a safer sport in the long run.
To read more: check out the full report in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
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