{"id":65542,"date":"2019-07-01T06:04:51","date_gmt":"2019-07-01T13:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/?p=65542"},"modified":"2020-05-22T12:57:11","modified_gmt":"2020-05-22T19:57:11","slug":"the-complicated-story-behind-bike-helmet-safety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/cycle\/the-complicated-story-behind-bike-helmet-safety","title":{"rendered":"The Complicated Story Behind Bike Helmet Safety"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s obvious why we wear helmets while riding a bicycle. <\/span>Research<\/span><\/a> shows that cycling is responsible for more head injuries than any other sport or recreational activity. So even though we don\u2019t intend to crash on our bike when we start pedaling, a helmet is an assurance that if we do crash, a layer of hard EPS foam will take the brunt of the impact.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, no helmet is as fool-proof as consumers may think.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s the bottom line: Every single bike crash is different,\u201d said Ren\u00e9 Costales, REI\u2019s senior category merchandising manager for bike and snow accessories. \u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly how to perfectly test for the safety of a helmet in all scenarios. That\u2019s the inconvenient truth about bike helmets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even as helmets incorporate new technologies like MIPS or Wavecel to offer more protection against concussions, federal testing standards are lagging and outdated. Most helmet manufacturers conduct their own internal testing, but the results of the test can be skewed by the method or context, and this leaves consumers in a bind. How much can we trust a company\u2019s claim about their helmet?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The<\/span> Helmet Lab at Virginia Tech<\/span><\/a> offers independent, third-party testing on football, hockey and bike helmets, among other sports such as soccer or baseball. By testing bike helmets for their ability to protect against brain injury, they complement the federal standard test.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In total, the lab has<\/span> tested and rated 69 bike helmets.<\/span><\/a> The top 20 are all made with either MIPS or Wavecel, which speaks to the effectiveness of these technologies at reducing some of the rotational forces. Megan Bland, a research assistant at the Helmet Lab, thinks these new technologies are very promising in terms of offering protection against head injuries, especially compared to a basic foam helmet without a rotational component. But she stopped just shy of saying one was better than the other.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think manufacturers are doing a great job of pushing the boundaries,\u201d said Bland. \u201cAt the end of the day, everyone is showing that they\u2019re better than nothing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Why cycling causes so many head injuries, and why it\u2019s so hard to study them<\/b><\/h5>\n

According to data collected by the<\/span> United States <\/span>Consumer Product Safety <\/span><\/a>Commission (CPSC), of the 446,788 sports-related head injuries treated at U.S. hospital emergency rooms in 2009, cycling was responsible for 85,389 of them. Football was second, with 46,948 head injuries. Experts in helmet testing presume that more people ride bicycles than play football. According to the<\/span> Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/span><\/a>, bike accidents cause 26,000 traumatic brain injuries to children and adolescents, annually.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the Helmet Lab at Virginia Tech, researchers evaluate how athletes experience head injuries and how helmets work to prevent them. Even with such straightforward objectives, bicycling can be a confounding area of study because it\u2019s difficult to collect data that informs exactly how people fall off their bikes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve tried to do our best to replicate real-world scenarios, but cycling is the most challenging,\u201d said Barry Miller, director of outreach for the Helmet Lab.<\/span><\/p>\n

The biggest reason why it\u2019s so hard to collect data is largely because cyclists don\u2019t expect to crash, and when they do, the circumstances of their crash are unique and varied. \u201cUsually these impacts are accidental, or they\u2019re not intentional,\u201d said Bland. \u201cSo we can\u2019t put thousands of dollars worth of instrumentation on someone and ask them to crash, and we don\u2019t have good quality video to figure out what typical cyclist head-impact conditions are.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

How researchers test bike helmets<\/b><\/h5>\n

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conducts standardized testing and certifies all bike helmets sold in the United States. By measuring linear forces\u2014dropping a helmet vertically onto a perpendicular test surface\u2014<\/span>the CPSC test <\/span><\/a>reveals how effective a helmet is at protecting against severe injuries, like skull fractures. Experts like Bland say the test is important to prevent catastrophic injury, but it is ineffective in testing new technologies like MIPS and Wavecel that work against rotational forces.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the standards [testing] may be a low bar of sorts, they have a really important function, in my opinion,\u201d said Bland. \u201cThey evaluate a severe-impact scenario.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, companies are conducting their own internal testing, and often the context or method of the test plays a big role in steering the outcome, said Bland. Wavecel, for example, used a \u201c<\/span>neck<\/span><\/a>\u201d in their test, while other tests <\/span>don\u2019t<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Without a standard to test the rotational element of a helmet, researchers at Virginia Tech\u2019s Helmet Lab looked to the research to come up with their own<\/span> methodology<\/span><\/a> for testing bike helmets. Bland relied on peer-reviewed, scientific literature that computes the mathematical parameters of a bike accident. She also recently took helmets that had been worn in a real-world bicycle crash and, based on the indentation in the helmet, reverse-engineered the accident to understand the impact conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you or I were falling from a bike, we\u2019d have a horizontal velocity. We\u2019d be moving in multiple directions,\u201d said Bland. \u201cWe\u2019d be coming down to the ground from the vertical, and we\u2019d have some horizontal speed. So we\u2019d actually hit the ground at an angle.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Virginia Tech tests helmets with an anvil set at a 45-degree angle and a piece of sandpaper on its surface to simulate road grit. They test each bike helmet model in six different locations, at high and low energies that mimic the speed the force at which a rider falls. The higher energy point represents the worst 10 percent of impacts, said Miller. The lower energy point represents about 50 percent of falls.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What bike helmets actually do to protect us from head injuries<\/b><\/h5>\n

While hard foam offers protection against a linear drop, it doesn\u2019t do much to lessen the rotational forces of a fall from causing a head injury, said Bland. Even the CPSC says that <\/span>no helmet has been proven to protect against concussions<\/span><\/a>; rather, the materials are designed to <\/span>absorb<\/span><\/i> the forces of energy that occur in a fall and cause skull fractures or concussions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But several new technologies have recently arrived on the market with the aim to prevent concussions, which are a result of linear or rotational\u2014or a combination\u2014forces of energy on your head.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MIPS, or Multi-Directional Impact Protection System, is the most pervasive of these technologies. Developed by scientific and medical researchers in Sweden in the late 1990s, the MIPS system is<\/span> designed<\/span><\/a> to be incorporated in almost any helmet on the market. It can now be found in helmets made by virtually all the<\/span> big manufacturers<\/span><\/a> in cycling, snow and other sports.<\/span><\/p>\n

MIPS may be the most widely available, but it\u2019s not the only one. The market is full of bike helmets made with different rotational technologies that all claim to achieve the same goal. Most recently, in March, Bontrager unveiled<\/span> Wavecel<\/span><\/a>, a honeycomb-esque layer of plastic in the helmet that, as the company describes, \u201cflexes, crumples and glides\u201d to absorb lateral and rotational energy forces upon impact. According to Bontrager and their development partners\u2019 internal testing, Wavecel is 48 times more effective at protecting your head from injuries than a basic EPS foam helmet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe best thing that I can say, is that we have seen promise that almost every helmet with some sort of rotational technology, whether that\u2019s MIPS or Wavecel or a bunch of other ones, have shown promise in reducing overall concussion likelihood compared to your standard foam helmet,\u201d said Bland. \u201cI think manufacturers are doing a great job of pushing the boundaries. And while it seems … like it\u2019s almost a battle, saying \u2018This is the best kind of technology,\u2019 I think at the end of the day, everyone is showing that they\u2019re better than nothing. So it really is a positive result overall. It\u2019s just easy to get caught up in the marketing a little bit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Editor’s note<\/strong>:\u00a0<\/em>Every helmet sold by REI meets all regulatory requirements; even the most inexpensive, basic helmet will help to keep you safer when you ride (or ski). Third-party testing is one of a variety of factors the co-op takes into consideration when thinking through our helmet assortment, including safety rating, fit, function, accessibility and price.<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s obvious why we wear helmets while riding a bicycle. Research shows that cycling is responsible for more head injuries than any other sport or recreational activity. So even though we don\u2019t intend to crash on our bike when we start pedaling, a helmet is an assurance that if we do crash, a layer of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":65908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1906,1127,727],"internal-tag":[],"class_list":["post-65542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cycle","tag-bike-helmets","tag-cycling","tag-latest-posts"],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/rei.com\/blog\/cycle\/the-complicated-story-behind-bike-helmet-safety","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"The Complicated Story Behind Bike Helmet Safety","url":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/cycle\/the-complicated-story-behind-bike-helmet-safety","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/cycle\/the-complicated-story-behind-bike-helmet-safety"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/06\/Content_Team_031919_0136.png?resize=150%2C150","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/06\/Content_Team_031919_0136.png?fit=1100%2C733"},"articleSection":"Cycle","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Michelle Flandreau"}],"creator":["Michelle Flandreau"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Uncommon Path \u2013 An REI Co-op Publication","logo":""},"keywords":["bike helmets","cycling","latest posts"],"dateCreated":"2019-07-01T13:04:51Z","datePublished":"2019-07-01T13:04:51Z","dateModified":"2020-05-22T19:57:11Z"},"rendered":"