Advancements in helmet design to reduce head injuries among NFL players may also have applications to enhance vehicle safety features, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety research found.
Though athletes are more susceptible to injuries playing contact sports like football, improved designs of safety gear, including helmets, has led to better protective equipment for players, according to the IIHS. Similar injury criteria used by the NFL to develop new gear that offers more protection could also aid automotive designers.
Crash tests and its effects on dummies, like the assessments conducted by IIHS, have led automakers to introduce safety features like airbags. Airbag design has benefited from decades of head injury research, and as a result “modern vehicles do an excellent job of protecting vehicle occupants’ heads,” IIHS senior research engineer Becky Mueller wrote in the analysis published on the IIHS website.
However, while current measurement techniques assess the risk of the most common brain injuries, Mueller explained that they fail to accurately capture risks of and solutions to mitigate rotational brain injury. These injuries sometimes occur when “the head will whip to the side after striking the airbag hard,” she wrote.
The NFL, however, uses a metric known as Diffuse Axonal Multi-Axis General Evaluation (DAMAGE) alongside traditional head injury criteria to determine the safety of player helmets. Unlike current crash test methods, DAMAGE captures rotational head injuries.
Mueller wrote that DAMAGE could be a helpful indicator for brain injury risk in crash tests. Indeed, the metric has been used since 2022 in vehicle crash tests conducted by the European New Car Assessment Program.
When the IIHS first used DAMAGE in its crash tests, the metric captured 60 whipping motion head injuries out of 800 dummies that were otherwise protected as expected by conventional airbags, suggesting that the research offered new insight into possible crash injuries.
While the IIHS is not yet incorporating DAMAGE results in its official vehicle crash test ratings, it expects to start including it in its general crash test findings this year.
Automakers can use the NFL data to improve vehicle safety. Mueller suggested a deeper frontal airbag with a softer center could do a better job of protecting a person’s head than a conventional airbag, as the deeper airbag could cushion a person’s head rather than allow it to whip to the side.
“Vehicle manufacturers don’t need to wait to start looking for ways to prevent the head-whipping motions that DAMAGE reveals,” Mueller said.
