With Will Smith’s movie Concussion bringing the issue of head trauma in professional football back into the national spotlight, and to a broader audience than ever before, many are wondering how American football can persist as a sport over time. The discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (a progressive degenerative disease, simply referred to as CTE) in the early 2000s, and its association with the deaths of Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, and others, does tend to make football feel like a dead-man’s’ sport — especially since 79% of all football players have CTE, as noted in September 2015 by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University.
But Vicis, a startup based out of Seattle, has recreated the football helmet in a valiant effort to bring a new degree of cranial safety to the sport that most of America waits six days a week to watch. Thus far, Vicis has developed just one helmet — dubbed “Zero1” — but the helmet shows promise in reducing the damage a football player is subject to when his head makes contact with another player’s chest, legs, head, etc. And this promise is something that Riddell and Schutt Sports, which currently make up 90% of the football helmet market, can only dream of.
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What makes the Zero1 so unique is that its initial development was largely based on replicating how impact damage in other real-life situations is reduced. Take, for example, impact in a car accident, which is primarily minimized using two different mechanisms: the bumper and the airbag. While bumpers and airbags look and feel different, they both diminish trauma due to impact by increasing the time over which a collision occurs. The force with which a given collision occurs is inversely related to the time over which it occurs, and thus, if the duration of a collision can be increased, its associated harm (the force) will decrease.
The Zero1 incorporates this knowledge into its CORE Layer, which is an inch-and-a-half of squishy columns bunched together that collectively reduce force in all directions. This CORE Layer is sandwiched between the LODE Shell — the exterior of the helmet; very similar to a car bumper — and the ARCH Shell, which couples with the FORM Liner to ensure that each individual helmet fits its wearer perfectly. The LODE Shell, CORE Layer, ARCH Shell, and FORM Liner all work in unison to bring football players not just safety, but also comfort, both of which are rather rare for a football helmet.
The LODE SHELL Absorbs impact load by locally deforming, like a car bumper. #Zero1Helmet #VicisPro pic.twitter.com/qywCVGdJG1
— VICIS (@VicisPro) January 16, 2016
Thus far, the Zero1 has produced its intended results. Through the simulations it has run, Vicis has seen its helmet reduce impact trauma between 20 and 50% better than Riddell and Schutt Sports helmets do. Which begs the question: why isn’t every football player already wearing a Vicis Zero1 helmet? Well, each unit costs $1,500, whereas helmets now in use range from just $200 – $400. That’s a huge difference in price. But for those who want to dedicate themselves to football, or for leagues who are facing a concussions crisis, $1,500 will likely be immaterial in exchange for a longer and healthier life.
So far Vicis has raised $10 million, with $500,000 coming from the NFL, and is hoping to start selling the Zero1 helmets to the NFL next season.