BYU Student & Team Develops Football Helmet Smartfoam that Signals Potential Concussions in Real Time

       

About the Smartfoam

          The concern of football-related concussions has been rising throughout the recent years. There has been a struggle to create technology that accurately measures them in real time. BYU mechanical engineering Ph.D. student, Jake Merrel, and a team of researchers have developed and tested a nano composite smartfoam that can be placed inside football helmets and pads to more accurately test the impact and power of hits. There is a measurement system on the market today, but it only directly measures the acceleration of an impact. This is not enough information to determine a potential head injury, and it can be inaccurate. Merrel and other researchers have developed a smartfoam that can measure a composite of acceleration, impact energy, and impact velocity to determine the severity and location of the impact. According to research published by the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, this nano composite smartfoam proves to be 90% accurate. Impact energy and velocity are two key data points that are necessary to accurately measure the risk of a player having a concussion, and no one has been able to successfully develop a technology that measures this (even the NFL), until Jake Merrell.

How it Works:

1. The BYU smartfoam is compressed.

2. As it is being compressed, nickel nano-particles rub against the foam creating a static electric charge.

3. This charge is collected through a conductive electrode in the foam, which is measured by a microcomputer.

4. The information is transmitted to a computer or whatever smart device it is connected to. (A hard hit spikes the voltage, while a small impact would result in a reduced spike in voltage.)

How Merrell has Impacted Sports

Several companies have been incorporating this technology into their products. Shoulder pads with this impact sensing technology have been created by Merrell and Xenith, and a company producing taekwondo vests have incorporated this smartfoam into their product.

I am sure that this technology will be incorporated in many other athletic products in the near future.

Works Cited
Brigham Young University. "Football helmet smartfoam signals potential concussions in real time, study suggests: Foam replaces regular padding in football helmets, produces immediate data on impacts." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 September 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170921090313.htm>.