Helmets save lives, but researchers in San Antonio want to do much more than that —they want to prevent cognitive decline and the onset of neurodegenerative diseases.
Daniel Portillo, mechanical engineer at the Southwest Research Institute and Morteza Seidi, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas San Antonio, are putting their heads together to create safer helmets.
Just last year, the NFL reported an 18% increase in regular-season concussions during its 2022 season. And a 2017 Boston University study found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 99% of brains obtained from NFL players, 91% in college football players and 21% in high school football players.
“These impacts cause long-term effects, like neurodegenerative diseases like CTE,” Seidi said. “We are just trying to protect everything [later] in life. If we can reduce the motion of the head in a blow to the head, we can reduce the long-term effects.”
Outside of football, 70 to 80% of brain injuries go undiagnosed, Seidi said. Soldiers and car crash victims who suffer traumatic brain injury (TBI) face long-term effects, like cognitive impairment, behavioral changes and headaches, and are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and depression.
The research is funded by a $125,000 grant from UTSA and SwRI’s Connect program.
So what’s wrong with the kind of helmets commonly worn by football players, bicycle riders and service members?
There are different types of helmets for different activities, but most helmets contain one or more layers of foam, some of which have been improved to be more stiff to withstand impacts.
“Each year, better helmets are coming on the market… but the number of concussions doesn’t go down, meaning more improvements are required and it’s a challenge that needs to be addressed,” Seidi said.
They have been testing the padding that goes into helmets for more than a year now. The padding being tested is made of elastomeric materials and becomes harder depending on the blow; while smaller impacts land softer.
On Oct. 1, Seidi and his graduate students tested impacts at different velocities using a linear impactor testing machine on a crash dummy wearing a helmet with the updated helmet pads. And they documented their findings to determine how the brain is affected when impacted at different gravitational forces.
They use data from the NFL to position the head and measure acceleration to accurately simulate hits that commonly occur on the field.
Marzieh Memar, an assistant professor in UTSA’s biomedical engineering department, is using her own technique to calculate how the brain will move inside the head when impacted to make sure the helmet’s design does a better job.
“It can determine how much the brain tissue inside the brain stretches, and these tools are good predictors of the location and the severity of damage in the brain,” she said.
The brain moves inside the skull to catch up to the motion of the head, she said. The stretches are the main reason for TBIs.
Meanwhile, mechanical engineering PhD student Alireza Abbasi Ghiri is writing his dissertation on helmet research. The challenge he says is to come up with padding that will remain stiff, no matter the impact.
“We have a lot of low-severity or repetitive impact that causes long-term implications that cause brain injury,” Abbasi Ghiri said. “That’s our motivation — to decrease those brain injuries.”
At SwRI, Portillo is focusing is on blunt and ballistic impact testing to expand the technology for military service members. Almost all military helmets SwRI has tested in the past have pads in them, but these pads aren’t designed with “multi-behavior” technology that becomes stiffer to withstands impacts.
“That’s the novel aspect,” Portillo said. “There are pads in military helmets now, however it doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.”
Just because the helmet stops the bullet or protects the head from hitting the ground, it doesn’t mean TBI isn’t possible, he said.
