San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
East Bay team creating safer football helmets
Tucked away in an unassuming cluster of warehouses on Richmond’s industrial west side, Dr. Robert Knight spends his days cracking heads.
Figuratively speaking, of course.
His laboratory houses a number of scary-looking contraptions, simulating gruesome impacts to the human cranium. Steel weights drop through the air, pounding plastic dummies in the noggin. A pendulum device smashes the helpless mannequins into simulated turf. Urgent alarms sound ahead of each collision. What’s the good doctor up to? The UC Berkeley neuroscientist believes he and his busi-
ness partners have developed a game-changing helmet design that could revolutionize not only football, but other sports that cause brain trauma, like hockey or cycling.
Their startup is called Brainguard. And it’s working to address “rotational force,” the twisting and turning of the brain that results when human heads meet blunt force.
“For 10 years, I ran the neuroscience institute at Berkeley,” said Knight, holding a human skull in his hands at the company’s lab. “In that 10-year period I had five Ph.D.s — car versus bicycle, helmeted — end up in the ICU. I just said, ‘Something’s not right. These helmets, they’re just not doing what they should do.’ I’m not saying helmets are bad. But, really, what they stop is your skull cracking and getting a big blood clot. What they don’t stop, very effectively, is twisting and turning.”
So, Knight reached out to some of his colleagues and suggested they start a company to address the issue.
“They said, ‘We’re not helmet people,’ ” Knight said. “I said, ‘Maybe that’s a good thing.’ ”
Knight and his partners began applying for patents in 2012. They opened the research and testing facility in 2015. They’ve funded the entire effort themselves. With the NFL playoffs in full swing, the Brainguard team hopes their product can find its way to market and protect players in the future.
“We came up with a really simple design, which is a twoshelled helmet,” Knight said. “The outer shell is attached to the inner shell with struts. So, when the outside’s hit, it turns. The force is dissipated by the struts and it doesn’t get to the inner shell, which is what’s attached to the athlete.”
In other words: The helmet twists, not the brain. The energy of the hit is absorbed in a better way. The Berkeley scientists believe they can reduce rotational force, and the damage it causes, by 35 to 40 percent.
Knight has a lighthearted way about him, discussing catastrophic brain trauma in a matter-of-fact or humorous way, telling it like it is.
“Have you seen the inside of a skull? A human skull?” he asks, handing me one. “I think this is important because a lot of people who make these helmets don’t actually look at a skull.”
Knight points out the inside of our skulls is mostly smooth, with one exception: the front. That’s where you can feel bony ridges protruding. When a human’s head is impacted, the brain bounces around quite a bit. Forward, backward and sideways. When the brain hits the front of the skull, the bony protrusions cause the most damage.
The resulting lesions are the first steps toward the debilitating disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. If you’ve followed any of the discussion surrounding brain trauma and football over the past 10 years, CTE has emerged as a major threat to former players. The symptoms start with anxiety, indecision, depression and confusion. They evolve into early-onset dementia and often lead the afflicted to commit suicide. Of 111 brains donated by the families of former NFL players to research at Boston University, 110 of them showed advanced CTE.
Brainguard is just one of the many companies trying to improve helmet safety. Currently, four major manufacturers are approved by the NFL: Riddell, Schutt, Xenith and Vicis. A relative newcomer, SG Helmets, also hopes to join the group of approved helmets, and it, too, believes it has an innovative answer, centered on custommade liners.
Brainguard, which uses a composite foam liner in its helmets to reduce vibration and absorb energy, is in the testing phase of the process, very much still in startup mode. Knight jokes that his prototype helmets were painted by the auto body shop next door.
Knight says the accepted testing agency, the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, will begin testing Brainguard’s helmets early this year. So will the NFL, at a company called Biokinetics Inc., based in Ottawa, Canada. There is no set timetable for these new helmets to be approved or go into production.
An NFL representative explained the process in an email to The Chronicle: “The NFL, in collaboration with the NFLPA, through their respective appointed biomechanical experts, coordinate extensive laboratory research to evaluate which helmets best reduce head impact severity . ... The results of the laboratory tests are ... shared with NFL players, club equipment managers, club medical, training and coaching staffs to help inform equipment choices.”
To pass that test, Knight and his colleagues spend their days bonking helmets with those high-tech testing machines. After each jarring collision, with dummy human heads wearing the helmet prototypes, sensors relay information to a huge database run by one of Knight’s chief collaborators and partners, Ram Gurumoorthy, also from UC Berkeley.
Gurumoorthy is focused on the aforementioned composite liner for inside the helmet, adjusting how the material is used depending on a player’s position.
“For quarterbacks, the primary hits are to the back of the head,” Gurumoorthy said. “For defensive linemen it’s in the front . ... So, we can customize and optimize by position. We will customize the foam, making it more dense or less dense.”
The Future of Football
Read The Chronicle’s series on the dangers posed by the game along with possible solutions: www.sfchronicle.com/ future-of-football
Kimberly Archie is a leading advocate for change in the world of helmets. Her son, Paul Bright Jr., died in an auto accident in 2014. He had played football as a youth and the grieving mother had his brain tested posthumously, suspicious that he had been acting strangely and that his death may have been hastened by brain trauma. He tested positive for early-stage CTE. He was 24.
As a legal consultant and member of numerous national youth sports advocacy groups, Archie wants to see things change.
“We need to fix the helmets. That’s a huge issue,” Archie said. “We have these new helmets coming out. They’re all claiming to be the next thing that’s going to save us. But they all still have the same design defects.”
She’s a big proponent of the newer SG helmet, calling it “the only helmet that changes the three key elements — vibration, heat trapping and the weight — the trifecta from hell.”
But the Brainguard idea intrigues her, though she hasn’t seen it up close.
“Rotational force is the key. We’ve known that from carcrash studies,” said Archie, who has a book coming out in January entitled, “Brain Damage: The two-minute warning for sports families that paid the ultimate price.”
“That’s the issue with whiplash and (other) injury. Certainly if you watch how players hit each other, if you take a blind side, it’s a totally different hit than when you know it’s coming. The angle at which you get hit also has a lot to do with it.”
Back in his Richmond laboratory, Knight stares at the skull in his hand and shakes his own head. He’s stuck on the idea that most helmet manufacturers have never seen the inside of a human head.
“Think about that a little bit. That’s like designing the outside of a car for protection, and not knowing where the seats are.”
Al Saracevic is sports editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: asaracevic@sfchronicle. com Twitter: @alsaracevic