Investigating an airbag enhanced head protection solution

Abstract

Traditional, foam-based helmets do a sufficient job protecting against linear impacts, but are not designed for angled ones. In other words, if you were to crash with your bicycle, as long as you wore a helmet you most likely avoided skull fracture - the injury type most related to linear impacts. You could however very well have suffered a concussion, which is the most common type of injury linked to angled impacts. Angled impacts bring on rotational acceleration to the brain, causing its structures to shear and stretch. This is something that it does not cope with well. The brain has an in-built protection against some levels of rotational violence, but it has not evolved to cope with the speeds and forces related to e.g. skiing or cycling. As a reaction to this, Mips AB developed their ‘Multi-directional Impact Protection System’ - the MIPS layer. It is the most successful solution to address rotational violence in helmets today. The company has filed a patent on a helmet concept that uses air filled elements - or “airbags” - to achieve the same function as the MIPS layer. The project has started from the patent idea and investigated whether the idea is feasible, predominantly through prototyping and testing in Mips’ test lab in Täby