The Giants’ rookie wide receiver said it was the first time he has ever suffered a concussion.
Why do we not have some sort of disposable crumple-zone accessory that can be added to the inside of someone’s helmet? It could be engineered to collapse at a certain amount of pressure, absorbing some of the energy of a collision and slowing down the movement of the head within the helmet, reducing the sudden and abrupt shock the brain normally receives in a concussion.
I think the guardian caps are somewhat like this, but at the end of the day it’s really hard to stop a brain from getting knocked around in your skull with enough force applied.
There are new helmets that are supposed to have increased protection. They kind of look funny and they’re not mandatory. Only a few players have chosen to wear them.
They’d need to make the helmets big enough to accommodate it, and those helmets are already getting pretty unwieldy. Also those crumple zones would get used up like, every play for the interior linemen. Defensive and Offensive line would basically have to get a new helmet every play.
I remember my concussion. Immediately afterward I was like a goldfish, couldn’t maintain short-term memory for more than like 10 seconds. I crashed on a group bicycle ride, after getting up and brushing myself off, I told the others to go on without me, and I’d just head back to my car. 15 seconds later, I’m biking back the opposite direction, and think “wait, where am I? where am I going?” repeated that for a few minutes, then an intense feeling of drowsiness hit me, so I pulled off the road to lie down on a grassy embankment in the sun. Passed out as soon as I got off my bike.
Woke up in the ambulance with tubes coming out of me, alongside some temperamental EMTs. Was scary, but I worked in a pharmacy at the time, and patients would identify themselves to me using their date of birth and name, so evidently I kept waking up, freaking out, telling them my name and date of birth, and then passing out again. They told me this later, but I did it a lot, which is why the EMTs were not happy to see me during the one instance of this I can recall.
woke up again in the hospital room, with more tubes coming out of me. The nurse at the time referred to the needle gauge they used for my IV as a “garden hose.” It was like 18mm, and hurt like hell, bruising up my vein. Was just writhing in pain, trying not to cry for hours until they finally gave me a new (much smaller) IV, and took out the hose. Ended up staying for a night, left the next day. 1/10, would not recommend.
Yeah, concussions suck.
The helmets are already pretty unwieldy due to current, largely ineffective methods of force reduction. This would replace those. Also, it would be engineered to give way at a certain amount of force, not just so easily that every lineman has theirs crumpling at every play, that would indicate very poor design.
think the hardest part from a engineering standpoint, is having a player encounter force enough to not fully utilize the crumple zone, but weaken it. The player wouldn’t realize that his crumple zone has been structurally weakened, and the next play in which the player gets hit hard enough to fully utilize the crumple zone, the zones “crumple” doesn’t work as well, which leaves the player worse off from a protection standpoint.
Yes, you would certainly want a fairly robust material that would weaken at a predictable rate. After thinking about it more, I’m now considering a re-usable system, made of some sort of rigid plastic, where there’s a gap between the head and helmet maintained by interlocking teeth. Under a heavy load, the plastic would deform, collapsing the space. Then you could just pop it back out after. Much like a medicine bottle’s child safety, the teeth would provide the bulk of their resistance in only one direction.
It’s not too different from re-usable breaking boards that martial arts schools sometimes use. Just much smaller, and repeated in a sort of matrix formation.
It’s definitely feasible, we possess the technology to make this happen. Might be expensive, I don’t know. Might also be inferior to this design:
Something is worth it to reduce concussion rates, I do hope the NFL eventually takes this more seriously, though I know they don’t actually give a shit about the players. Current helmets are an absolute joke, though, it should be embarrassing in these modern days. Kinetic energy can be absorbed/converted/dissipated in many different ways.
Yeah I could see how that would work, interesting design idea! they’d probably be pretty easy to mass produce too, so having a player pop in a new insert wouldn’t be so laborious as to hinder the game.
But those liquid shock absorbers, now that’s wild, seems like some Stanford peeps beat us to the punch 😅
