Tim Lougheed
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Chances are that bicycle helmet may save your life if you are in a major accident, but it might not protect you from a concussion caused by a minor fall. Similarly, a hockey helmet may prevent concussions caused by repeated collisions at lower speeds, but it is not intended to save you from a direct, high-impact blow.
Such contrasts reveal the shifting priorities of protective headgear, a complex design challenge that is being explored by Professor Blaine Hoshizaki, director of the Faculty of Health Sciences’ School of Human Kinetics. Before joining the school in 2003, he spent more than a decade examining the strengths and weaknesses of hockey helmet technology, first as a consultant to the Montreal Canadiens and later, with leading equipment manufacturers Bauer and CCM.
Along the way he began to hone the techniques that were being applied to the testing of helmets. Starting with rudimentary systems over the last two years - like dropping helmets from on high to hard surfaces below - Professor Hoshizaki has been able to assemble a sophisticated laboratory with approximately $500,000 in funding from private investors.
Today, you will find graduate students and faculty members working with pneumatic guns that can hit a target with extreme precision. Head/neck “crash test dummies,” outfitted with more than a dozen different sensors for measuring motion and pressure, serve as those targets,
In this way, Professor Hoshizaki and his colleagues have carried out thousands of tests, yielding unprecedented volumes of data on what helmets do. It has enabled him to tackle some of the most fundamental issues facing organizations such as the NHL and NFL, which have different demands of helmets than consumers looking to protect themselves from bicycle accidents.
“Our question back to these user groups is where do you want your protection?” says Professor Hoshizaki. “Nobody has really defined what ‘more protection’ is. Is it protecting against catastrophic injuries, or concussive injuries?”
Because of the regulations that govern the play of hockey, Professor Hoshizaki explains, catastrophic injuries remain relatively rare, while the risk of concussion is high. A bicycle or motorcycle rider, on the other hand, needs a helmet designed to protect the head against a catastrophic impact. These two types of applications call for distinctly different protection mechanisms.
In fact, the research being conducted at the University of Ottawa is defining entirely new prospects for all types of applications. Rather than filling helmets with foam or other compressible materials intended to absorb the energy of impacts, investigators have found chambers containing air do the job much more effectively.
“It gave us another tool for managing energy,” says Professor Hoshizaki, noting that the release of air from these chambers likewise prevents this energy from affecting an individual’s head or neck. The extent of this release correlates to the amount of air in each chamber, making it possible to calibrate a helmet’s performance to suit the needs of a particular sport.
Besides setting new certification standards not just in areas like sporting goods, such innovations could even produce protective features to meet the needs of demanding military or industrial markets.
“This is what’s exciting, that we can now engineer these things right into the helmet,” he concludes.
