Development and Evaluation of a Test Method for Assessing the Performance of American Football Helmets
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Annals of Biomedical Engineering (Ó 2020) https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-020-02626-6
Concussion Biomechanics in Football
Development and Evaluation of a Test Method for Assessing the Performance of American Football Helmets LEE
ANN M. BAILEY ,1 ERIN J. SANCHEZ,1 GWANSIK PARK,1 F. GABLER,1 JAMES R. FUNK,1 JEFF R. CRANDALL,1 MICHAEL WONNACOTT,2 CHRIS WITHNALL,2 BARRY S. MYERS,3 and KRISTY B. ARBOGAST4
1 Biomechanics Consulting and Research, LLC, Charlottesville, VA, USA; 2Biokinetics and Associates, Ltd., Ottawa, ON, Canada; 3Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA; and 4Center for Injury Research and Prevention, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
(Received 20 August 2020; accepted 17 September 2020) Associate Editor Stefan M Duma oversaw the review of this article.
Abstract—As more is learned about injury mechanisms of concussion and scenarios under which injuries are sustained in football games, methods used to evaluate protective equipment must adapt. A combination of video review, videogrammetry, and laboratory reconstructions was used to characterize concussive impacts from National Football League games during the 2015-2017 seasons. Test conditions were generated based upon impact locations and speeds from this data set, and a method for scoring overall helmet performance was created. Head kinematics generated using a linear impactor and sliding table fixture were comparable to those from laboratory reconstructions of concussive impacts at similar impact conditions. Impact tests were performed on 36 football helmet models at two laboratories to evaluate the reproducibility of results from the resulting test protocol. Head acceleration response metric, a head impact severity metric, varied 2.9–5.6% for helmet impacts in the same lab, and 3.8–6.0% for tests performed in a separate lab when averaged by location for the models tested. Overall inter-lab helmet performance varied by 1.1 ± 0.9%, while the standard deviation in helmet performance score was 7.0%. The worst helmet performance score was 33% greater than the score of the best-performing helmet evaluated by this study. Keywords—Concussion, Helmet, Kinematics, Biomechanics, Football.
Address correspondence to Ann M. Bailey, Biomechanics Consulting and Research, LLC, Charlottesville, VA, USA. Electronic mail: [email protected]
INTRODUCTION A variety of test methods have been developed to assess the ability of American football helmets to mitigate the severity of head impacts. In the 1970s, the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) developed a headform drop test standard for American football helmets with a focus on preventing catastrophic injuries (e.g., skull fracture) by limiting translational head acceleration.20,25,26 More recent concerns about concussion have motivated the inclusion of both linear and rotational head kinematics in the evaluation of helmets.20,25,35 Pellman et al. developed a test fixture and procedure that evaluated a helmet’s ability to miti
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