Researchers Show Air Bag Bike Helmets Have Promise

Foam Bike Helmets – Reduce Possibility of Skull Fracture/Brain Damages

An assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, David Camarillo is well aware that bicycling had been the main cause of sports and activity connected concussion together with brain injury in the United States.

With bicycling accidents, he had received two concussions and though he is not doubtful that wearing a helmet would be better than no helmet at all, he is of the belief that the traditional helmets do not seem to be protective for the rider as much as they should.

Camarillo had stated that foam bike helmets have proved to reduce the possibility of skull fracture together with other severe brain damages. However he thinks that many misleadingly are of the belief that bike helmets tend to protect against concussion, which is not true.

Being aware of what he does regarding the traditional bike helmets, Camarillo whose lab tends to work on understanding and preventing concussions decided to experiment a new kind of helmet, which is available in some of the European countries. The outcomes have been included in the September 27 edition of Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

Designed to Address Situations

The helmet which Camarillo had tested has a soft pocket worn around the neck which tends to pop up like an air bag around the head of the person when it gets alerted of a possible collision.

 Initially he had been designed to address the situations that people did not desire to wear helmets for visual reasons This air bag helmet had been compared to the traditional foam bike helmets by the researchers where the results seemed to be quite remarkable.

Mehmet Kurt, a postdoctoral scholar in the Camarillo Lab commented that they conducted drop test which seemed like typical federal test to assess bicycle helmet and observed that air bag helmets with the precise initial pressure could reduce head accelerations five to six times in comparison to traditional bicycle helmet.

The drop test comprises of placing the helmets on dummy head with accelerometers and dropping it, from neck-side up from different height on a metal platform. At two different angles, the head form had been tilted, faking hits of the crown as well as the side of the head.

More Cushioned Fall

Researchers had dropped the helmets from 0.8 meters to a height of two meters and had measured the direct speeding up of the helmet when it had hit the ground. Camarillo had informed that the huge size of the air bag helmet in comparison to foam bike helmets seems to be a possible source of its achievement.

Besides being large, it can also be soft enabling a more cushioned fall. But this cushioning seems to have a possible shortcoming. The air bag helmet, during the experiment was pre-inflated and the researchers had exploited the pressure of the air in the helmet before each drop to obtain the results.

 Deprived of the maximum amount of the air, the air bag helmet could bottom out resulting in the head to hit the ground with more force than it would be in the case of a traditional foam helmet. In the present form of the air bag helmet, a chemical process tends to activate expansion that does not guarantee maximum air pressure.