Friday, December 12, 2008

Sport Helmet to Prevent Neck Injuries

Filed under: Sports Medicine

This summer we missed an innovative new helmet that researchers at University of British Columbia developed to prevent neck injuries during serious collisions. Essentially, the helmet has an two concentric shells that can rotate relative to each other depending on the collision.

From the device info page:

The Pro-Neck-Tor™ technology will induce head motion if and only if a certain force threshold is reached at the interface between the shells. This means that helmets designed around the Pro-Neck-Tor™ technology should behave exactly like existing helmets except in a head-first impact. Pro-Neck-Tor™'s design is still under development, but preliminary proof-of-concept tests using mechanical models of the head and neck have been carried out by scientists and engineers at the Injury Biomechanics Laboratory at The University of British Columbia. In these tests the Pro-Neck-Tor™ helmet considerably reduced neck loads in head-first impacts over a range of impact conditions when compared to impacts to the unprotected head.

Pro-Neck-Tor homepage with video of how the helmet functions...

Press release: UBC Researchers Invent Helmet that Significantly Reduces Forces to Neck During Head-first Impact ...

(hat tip: Rohit Joshi)

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