Building a better helmet: "Brainguard"

(rhythmic music) - [Narrator] Helmets are supposed to protect our heads against injury, right? (thumping) But how well do most helmets do that? - Obviously, this particular one is for NFL. - [Narrator] Most helmets don’t really do a good enough job, says Professor Bob Knight, who has spent his career studying the human brain. Now, he’s building a new helmet to better protect against the kind of brain damage caused by not just big blows to the head, but also those more common, smaller jolts that rattle the delicate brain. - The brain is a very soft structure. It almost has the structure of a jello. Most people think that the skull is like an eggshell. It’s perfectly smooth and the beautiful brain sits inside, but it’s not true.

00:50 - The inside of the skull is actually replete with bony ridges and these bony ridges, when there’s force to the skull and the brain starts bouncing around, produce all kinds of damage. It kicks off a cascade of reactions that actually kill brain cells. - [Narrator] Enough of that brain bouncing can add up to debilitating illness like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CTE, causing any number of conditions like memory loss, aggression, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, even suicide. (beeping) (tapping) Knight’s idea? Build a helmet that’s actually two helmets in one: an inner layer covering the skull and a top layer that deflects the impact. They’re attached to each other with struts like flexible shock absorbers.

01:39 - - So the internal shell is attached to the brain and then there’s a second shell that’s attached with a strut mechanism just like struts on bridges. The external shell, when it’s hit, it moves. The struts which are attached absorb force and diminish force. Perfect, so we get the same force. - [Narrator] Knight and his team call their startup BrainGuard. Another key part of the BrainGuard design is the type of padding used. - This is the padding material you saw in the helmet. It’s a very thin piece of it. Here’s a conventional foam pad. It’s even thicker than this. Watch what happens when I drop a ball on it. If the ball bounces back up, it means the material didn’t absorb energy. It’s actually just bounced. It went right through and bounced off the wood. (thumps) - [Narrator] Testing their prototype against others on the market, Knight says theirs reduces the force from impacts by 25 to 50% and does that without being any bigger or heavier than the others.

02:40 - - We could put it inside a hockey helmet, bike helmet, a snowboarding helmet, a construction helmet. There’s no bounds to where it can be used. My dream is that someday my seven-year-old granddaughter is gonna be wearing a bike helmet that’s well designed. If she has that one time she falls off her bike, she’s gonna get a dramatic decrease in the chances of her getting a serious brain injury. (beeping) (tapping) .