When modern football helmets were introduced, they all but eliminated traumatic skull fractures caused by blunt force impacts.
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Mounting evidence, however, suggests that concussions are caused by a different type of head motion, namely brain and skull rotation.
Now, a group of Stanford engineers has produced a collection of results that suggest that current helmet-testing equipment and techniques are not optimized for evaluating these additional injury-causing elements.
For the past several years, David Camarillo, an assistant professor of bioengineering and, by courtesy, of mechanical engineering at Stanford, and his students have been collecting and analyzing data in hopes of identifying the signature skull motions that cause concussions.
Camarillo’s team first set out to determine what degree of oscillation is dangerous. They fed pre-existing MRI data into a computer model of the brain, and found that the brain’s relative motion is amplified when the head oscillates at 15-20 Hz, completing a single back-and-forth motion in about 50 milliseconds.
They compared this to field data of sports-related head impacts – which they had collected over the past several years from Stanford football players who wear mouthguards instrumented with accelerometers – and found that players frequently experienced head oscillations in the 20 Hz range.
“We know that if the head shakes at that frequency, the brain starts to rattle more violently,†said Kaveh Laksari, a postdoctoral scholar in Camarillo’s lab, and first author on the paper.
“So we have this mechanical system that exhibits a dangerous mode of motion, and then we find that the in-game impacts excite it at that frequency or something close to it. This introduces a fresh viewpoint on the possible cause of repetitive brain trauma. We need to keep that in mind when we’re designing protective equipment.â€
The standard test for every football helmet used in the NFL or NCAA involves a guillotine-like device that drops a helmet-clad dummy head from multiple heights to approximate various impact magnitudes.
But when Fidel Hernandez, a Stanford doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, began comparing results from this drop test to what Camarillo’s group had observed in the field, it was like looking at two different data sets.
High rotational velocities, which are thought to induce brain strain and have been predictive of concussions, were observed in the field impacts but not the drop tests. And while field data showed rotational head motions in the 15-20 Hz range, drop tests generated much faster, 100 Hz movements.
Similarly, rotational accelerations were substantially lower in certain drop tests. Drop testing was also unable to produce accelerations across the full six-degrees-of-freedom spectrum of directions observed in field impacts, and which Camarillo’s group has previously shown are important factors in an injury.
“The problem with having a model that doesn’t re-create what players actually experience in the field, is that you could optimize a helmet to perform well in the drop test that unintentionally performs poorly in the field,†said Hernandez, who was lead author on the study.
“For instance, you could design a helmet to stop linear head motion or high-frequency head vibration, because that shows up in the test, but that might not be what is most dangerous to your brain.†■