The 2017 NFL season saw a “statistically significant” increase in the proportion of head injuries caused by helmet-to-helmet collisions. Richard Kent, an engineer who consults to the NFL Health and Safety Committee, shared that preliminary finding from the NFL’s forensic concussion research.
Kent, the deputy director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Applied Biomechanics, shared those early results during a call on Wednesday with engineers and equipment designers. As part of its Engineering Roadmap, the NFL has released sophisticated digital models of four popular helmet types to crowdsource and stimulate innovation in order to enhance athlete safety.
Virginia’s biomechanics department—led by Kent and director Jeff Crandall, who chairs the NFL’s engineering committee—has spearheaded the effort to identify the cause of concussive blows. For every documented concussion, researchers catalog 150 observations and data points. This was the second straight season, Kent said, that concussions from helmet-to-helmet contact increased.
“One of the consequences of this finding is that helmet-to-helmet impacts remain the highest priority for concussion-prevention efforts whether they be in style of play, rules of the game or equipment design,” he said. “This finding also further motivates the Engineering Roadmap’s mission to create incentives for developing and commercializing new and improved helmets.”
Kent also broke down the most common types of events that cause concussions. For the past three years, the leading incident predictably was tackles, both tackling and being tackled. Blocking was consistently the next most common.“The take-home message for today is that we’re not seeing a dramatic change from past years,” Kent said of the involved on-field actions.
The NFL pledged $60 million toward the Engineering Roadmap in September 2016 as past of its Play Smart, Play Safe initiative. That money is intended to help research produce safer helmets and other equipment. Last fall, Crandall discussed an interest in pursuing position-specific helmets to protect athletes from the impacts each were most likely to endure.
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This week marked the distribution of finite element computer models of four helmets that are both popular in the NFL and distinct in how they mitigate the force of impact. Each model was constructed by a different research university: the VICIS ZERO1 by Virginia, the Schutt Air XP Pro by Wake Forest University School of Medicine, the Riddell Revolution Speed Classic by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and the Xenith X2E by the University of Waterloo in Ontario. The models are publicly available so that others can perform computational research on the different designs.
The NFL’s VP of health and safety initiatives, Jennifer Langton, addressed the engineering community that would be using this toolkit, saying the intention is “to help you develop effective, novel helmet design to enhance athletes’ health and safety. By investing in this toolkit, our goal is to give you all the resources you need to develop better technologies and also provide a platform you can use and refine computationally before you build and/or test your prototype.”