Incorporating Human Body Mass in Standards of Helmet Impact Protection against Traumatic Brain Injury

TL;DR

This paper highlights the importance of considering human body mass and impact angle in helmet standards to better prevent traumatic brain injuries, proposing a new approach to improve safety guidelines.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate body mass and impact orientation into helmet impact standards, addressing limitations of current acceleration-based criteria.

Findings

Current standards overestimate injury thresholds by ignoring body mass.

Effective impact force depends on body orientation and mass.

Proposed method improves helmet safety assessment accuracy.

Abstract

Impact induced traumatic brain injury (ITBI) describes brain injury from head impact not necessarily accompanied by skull fracture. For sufficiently abrupt head impact decelerations, ITBI results from brain tissue stress incurred as the brain crashes into the inside of the skull wall, displacing the surrounding cerebral spinal fluid (CSF). Proper helmet cushioning can damp the impact force and reduce ITBI. But force is mass times acceleration and commonly used helmet blunt impact standards are based only on acceleration thresholds. Here I show how this implies that present standards overestimate the minimum acceleration onset for ITBI by implicitly assuming that the brain is mechanically decoupled from the body. I quantify how an arbitrary orientation of the body with respect to impact direction increases the effective mass that should be used in calculating the required damping force and injury threshold accelerations. I suggest a practical method to incorporate the body mass and impact angle into ITBI helmet standards and provide direction for further work.