Kinetic Response Helmet

Advances have improved the safety margin football helmets provide, but they are still limited to "shock absorber" strategies that reduce peak accelerations during pad compression. The extreme hits that professional players encounter would require increasing the pad thickness to 5”. As spectators we consider hits extreme when they completely upend the player. Concussive damage however occurs at the very beginning of these events and are much too fast to see without slow motion.

Increasing helmet padding to absorb the hit (so players don’t) has the negative side effect of increasing the rotational accelerations. Rotational accelerations are the cause of most concussions and are the precise movement least controlled by padding. The brain survives in line hits much better than ones that involve rotation as demonstrated by the ease of creating havoc within a snow globe by a simple twist.

The Kinetic Response Helmet (KRH) reacts to concussive level impacts by creating a large resisting torque capable of countering that caused by the hit. This kinetic response is created by rapidly accelerating a small weight through circular pathways within the helmet. Countering an extreme clockwise head rotation, for example, involves sending a weight down a halo oriented pathways so as to provide a countering torque. With proper timing and controlled acceleration the resulting Kinetic Response can convert a damaging impact into one that is a proper part of the game. The hit from an NFL player at full speed often creates 200G maximum impacts with conventional helmets. The Kinetic Response Helmet creates a countering force (by accelerating a weight equal to 1⁄4 cup of water through raceways within a helmet shell) capable of limiting the hit’s effect to just 70G.