Virginia Tech Helmet Lab to develop safety helmet ratings

This is the helmet lab at Virginia Tech. Our primary research is injury by mechanics, so we look to figure out the forces that cause injury to the human body. And if we understand that, we could do things to prevent injury from occurring. We do all kinds of injury research, but we're certainly best known for our concussion research and our helmet ratings, hence the name, the helmet lab. Roughly 15, 16 years ago, the guys down in the Quip R Moon Athletics asked doctor Duma, can you help us pick a safer football helmet? He said, well, we need to quantify what happens inside the helmet to really understand how we can pick better helmets, and so we started putting sensors inside Virginia Tech football players helmets. Once we understood how frequently the players hit their heads, how hard, where on the helms impacted, and which impacts were most likely to cause concussion, we can then take that data into the lab to build test equate to mimic those conditions. So now we have a pretty good understanding of when these acceleration numbers get to certain levels, your risk of concussion goes up. You know. We have nine star ratings, so Varsity football, youth football, flag football, soccer, equestrian sports, whitewater sports, cycling, hockey, and I miss one? There's nine. We're going to be launching a safety helmet research project really soon. That will be our first involvement with PPE personalized protective equipment. According to the manufacturers, more safety helmets are sold than all the sports combined. It's a huge market, H huge number of people wear helmets, and they wear them for 8 hours a day. There's lots of exposure in those environments to injury risk. Hopefully going to be about an 18 month project. We're looking at maybe August of 2025 to have a completion date. There are two things that make our lab very unique. First is the scientific effort. Everything we do is peer reviewed in journal publications. The second thing that's equally important is the independence. We're independent of any helmet manufacturer. We don't get any royalties, we have no financial ties, we don't make a product. We're just telling you what we think are the best helmets to buy. So this is really affecting industry. People are using the helmet ratings to make informed decisions when they're buying helmets, and obviously that affects helmet manufacturers. So first and foremost, our goal is to educate consumers. But second, we want our methods to serve as a design tool for helmet manufacturers to make better products.