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This 3D printed football helmet liner promises better protection
Football equipment company Riddell and 3D printing and manufacturing firm Carbon announced today that they are teaming up to improve head protection for football players. The pair will produce custom-fitted, 3D printed helmet liners that will aim to absorb contact and provide more protection for football players at all levels.
Football concussions could be reduced, if Riddell's InSite system goes into play
"This is not a diagnostic tool." That's what Riddell, the country's largest manufacturer of football helmets, kept emphasizing during a presentation of its newly developed InSite head-impact monitoring system. The fact it would throw this disclaimer out there isn't surprising, really. After all, the topic involving concussions in the NFL is one that's been massively debated by many different entities, inside and outside of the sport, over the past few years. Most recently, PBS debuted a documentary titled League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis, in which it delved deep into the "hidden story" between brain injuries and the National Football League. But the problem itself goes considerably deeper than that: Here in the United States, the game is ubiquitously played across youth, middle school, high school, college and, of course, professional levels. And while both the NFL and NCAA have made rule changes in order to "protect" players by trying to minimize the number of hits above the neck, the same can't be said for lower-level leagues -- not to mention, there's only so much that can be done in a game which requires body-to-body contact at full speed during 15-minute quarters.
Intel learns from Dr. Dre, wants Atom chips in NFL helmets to know when heads are ringing
We always understood that Intel looked after the rock stars of tomorrow, but who knew that included football players? Yup, according to PC World, Intel is currently investigating adding Atom chips inside NFL helmets to provide real-time impact data to medical staff on the sidelines. While there's no explicit time frame set for this project, we're thinking the sooner the better -- lest we forget it took the league until 2009 to require players who display signs of a concussion to stop playing for at least one day. This isn't the first time though that the world's largest chip maker has actually helped make the gridiron safer. In fact, it previously worked with helmet maker Riddell's fittingly named HITS (Head Impact Telemetry System) and academic researchers to run head injury simulations using linked Xeon-powered computers. Off the field, Intel is also currently partnering with the Mayo Clinic to boost medical cranial scans using MIC (Many Integrated Core) supercomputer co-processors. Codenamed Knights Corner, this hardware puts teacher's pets to shame by running trillions of calculations per second, and apparently accelerates head scans by up to 18 times. Sure, safety's all well and good, but we know Intel's really just curious about how Moore's Law holds up to the shoulder pressure of NFL d-backs.
Riddell starts shipping concussion-monitoring football helmets
We've seen a couple helmet systems that monitor impacts -- including prototype football helmets -- but Riddell is bringing the tech to market with the Revolution IQ HITS (Head Impact Telemetry System) helmet, which contains a system of sensors that stores data about the last 100 impacts, which can later be wirelessly transmitted to a laptop for analysis. Up to six $999 helmets can be linked to each $299 HITS receiver, and players and trainers can access data via a web app for later evaluation. The helmet is shipping now, and apparently the University of Missouri and several other NCAA schools have already placed orders.[Via Technology Review]
