Invisible Bike Helmet Inflates Before Impact
core77.com
core77.com
One: I fell off at slow speeds going round a corner, there was oil on the road, no ones fault, banged my head quite hard but was otherwise fine.
Two: On a motorway at ~65MPH a fucking prick threw a coke can out of his car which quickly decelerated and hit my visor. The visor cracked but maintained it's integrity and saved at least my nose and at most my life.
Please wear a full helmet, there are a lot of pricks in the world.
PS: I'm swearing in this post so you get the idea that 15 years later I still get really angry at this idiot.
15 years ago while cruising along a country road at 65 mph, I very clearly remember seeing, for a flash of a second, the point of a beak of a small bird as it hit my visor right in front of my left eye.
Without a visor (or helmet), I would have been blinded for sure.
It would get annoying as hell when this thing senses similar accelerations from non-car-hitting-you movements like bending over to roll up a pant leg or changing positions. Prankster friends would have a heyday too.
Dainese has an has an impressive motorcycle airbag suit - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo9Vlt5tGwY
tl;dr - That thing would go off all that time if they made it sensitive enough to work.
(Perhaps you can make airbag-helmets that inflate when the bike hits something, which will do for the case where you hit something in the road and get thrown off, or where a car collides with the bike. Not so good for tree branches and such, though.)
By any measure, it sure beats riding without helmet.
Obviously an airbag helmet will be safer (but more inconvenient) than no helmet. Presumably it will be less safe (but maybe more convenient and better looking) than an ordinary helmet.
It needs to beat both to succeed: that is, either some people who currently use helmets need to be convinced that the loss in safety from using an airbag helmet is small enough to be outweighed by the gain in convenience or looks or whatever, or some people who currently don't use helmets need to be convinced that the gain in safety from using an airbag helmet is large enough not to be outweighed by the loss in convenience or looks or whatever.
This seems pretty difficult to me, especially as I bet the convenience gain isn't very big: I bet an effective airbag helmet needs to fit you about as well as an ordinary helmet, and it'll need to be put on with about as much care.
In that video where the rider was hit from behind, there was very low relative change in velocity of the sensors in that helmet - no direct impact spike - and its on par with the same levels of acceleration you would experience in everyday bike riding.
Also, I'm sure in the 5 years they spent on product R&D, the concerns that came up to you in few minutes here were raised too.
The accelerometers in your car are bolted to your 4,000lb frame, riding on dampened shocks and rubber tires - you will never experience acceleration anywhere close to what you would in a frame-on collision.
They don't have a shipping product yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDaqcEkQRnM&feature=relat...
You can use tracker http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/
to calculate the decelerations on jumps. They are huge, bigger than the car hitting the back on the bike.
The only way to do this is to monitor the direction of the deceleration, not only the magnitude.
The one thing I'd disagree with about this helmet is its invisibility - it doesn't encourage other people to wear one. I don't know whether that's marketing advice or safety advice, but having everybody wear visible helmets sets a strong example.
Personally I've bought a helmet the day after my first bike accident and am wearing it constantly since then (While on the bike, that is.) Unfortunately it's going to be quite costly to let everybody experience an accident in order to teach them wearing helmets.
And if you think about it, if you're flying with 20-30km/h towards a tree, no helmet is going to save you. Even if the head is protected, your neck will break. With lower speeds I guess you still have time to try to fall in such a way so the head is somewhat protected. Btw, I'm not avoiding helmets so I can look cool. It's just one more gear to carry and worry about. And I may still get a helmet if start riding more cross-country. Right now I'm riding on road and unpredictable falls look more unlikely.
What if the majority of the bikers who stopped biking were less experienced and thus more dangerous on average? This seems likely because the more committed people are likely to be more experienced, and those who don't have a helmet handy on some particular ride and so don't ride are also likely to be less experienced.
You could blame the helmets themselves for causing injury and that may be partly true but a more likely reason is 30% less cyclists meaning that car drivers were less used to sharing the road with cyclists. A common bike accident term is "SMIDSY", meaning "Sorry mate, I didn't see you" since they simply didn't expect a cyclist to be there.
Both me and the car were doing about 20mph, fortunately it wasn't head on and they just swiped across into me. I went flying and landed square on my chin, at that speed there is nothing you can do to "fall in a better way". I ended up in hospital with a suspected broken jaw although it could have been far worse, if I had landed on the top of my head rather than my face I could have ended up with brain damage - or worse...
With the way I fell a helmet would have stopped me from having a huge graze from my chin up to my forehead.
Helmets do work, it is true that they aren't going to save you in a head on collision with a speeding car but they will help prevent sever head injury in the type of accident that happens commuting to work.
Frankly I think its stupid not to wear a helmet, I was stupid, and it should be law in the UK to wear one. Your head is the most important part of your body and you should do what ever it takes to prevent damage to it!
I ride a bike every day and I have never hit a car. Heck, I've never seen a biker hit a car, even though I see a hundred bikers or so each day. Nobody wears helmets in the Netherlands. If you see somebody with a helmet you can be sure that it's a foreigner, somebody under the age of four, or somebody on a racing bike.
Now suppose you do get hit and lets even suppose that you get hit on the head. What's the probability that you get hit on the helmet? Small: only the top of your head is protected. For racing bikers it can help. Due to the way you sit on those bikes it's much more likely you'll land on the top of your head.
It makes more sense to wear gloves than to wear a helmet. Nine out of ten times your hands will get injured. And in my experience you do think about how you fall in the split second you're in the air. When you're not wearing gloves you'll be less inclined to grind your hands over the asphalt.
My problem is, I'd bet that crashes causing serious harm happen way faster than that: 20km/h is the average speed of a champion marathon runner, and no one runs with an helmet. My 2nd guess as to why is that if helmets were effective when it matters, at higher speeds, they would look very similar to a motorcycle helmet, and be impractical.
So, facing the choice between something that does its job, and something ineffective but slightly less impractical, lawmakers try to make the latter mandatory. It reminds me of the TSA "security" policies...
Do you really believe bicycle helmets are completely ineffective? I'm going to have to call [citation needed] on that, because having at some hard padded thing on my head seems like it should at least help somewhat. Concussions, etc.
A very nutshell summary is that the minor benefits are accompanied by minor drawbacks. For example you'll not get much benefit if dragged under a 16-wheeler and research shows that drivers will come closer when overtaking someone wearing a helmet.
A major problem though is that well-meaning types want to legally enforce helmets in the name of safety. An immediate impact of this would be to reduce cycling amongst those who think helmets are a nuisance or uncool (as well as another reason for cops to hassle the poor/minorities for breaking laws that they won't bother the better off about). It's fairly well documented that more cyclists/cycling means safer cycling so anything that discourages cycling makes the remaining cyclists less safe.
But I'm not convince that the benefit of helmets for cyclists far exceeds the benefit of the same helmets on pedestrians, or on car passengers. Now, most people agree that there's a comfort/price/benefit compromise, which makes it inappropriate to enforce mandatory helmets onto pedestrians, although it would obviously save some lives. In order to accept that what applies to pedestrians doesn't apply to cyclists, I'd like to get some hard data, not some "gut feeling" from lawmakers who barely read what they vote for.
Also, I could understand that serious head traumas avoided in significant numbers would justify a law: in most civilized countries, the corresponding hospital bills and disability grants are paid by public insurance, i.e. taxpayers; cyclist are therefore accountable in front of them. But if it mostly saves scalps from roadrashes, I don't think that a law is appropriate.
My 2nd guess as to why is that if helmets were
effective when it matters, at higher speeds
How fast you're travelling is mostly irrelevant, what matters is how hard your head hits the deck. The street surface is perpendicular to your velocity, so your head generally receives an impact no harder than if you had just fallen over while stationary. This betrays the real problem - the average impact speed of a motorcycle head injury is only very slightly higher than that of a cyclist, mainly due to the extra mass.
We know that motorcycle helmets work very effectively. They are markedly superior to cycle helmets in two main respects - they have much thicker EPS foam and so can absorb much more energy, and the smooth round shape of a motorcycle helmet reduces torsional forces on the head and neck, which can be just as lethal as impacts.
The problem cycle helmets have is in providing sufficient protection while still being acceptable to consumers. There is nothing stopping manufacturers from producing cycle helmets that vastly exceed mandatory or voluntary standards (Downhill-specific helmets do) but most cyclists are simply unwilling to wear a large, heavy helmet.
Personally, I think the actuarial data leads to an obvious conclusion - we should do whatever maximises the number of cyclists. The risk of being killed or injured while cycling is completely outweighed by the health benefits of physical fitness. In addition, a number of studies indicate that "safety in numbers" is the most important factor in cycle safety - the more riders on the road, the better other road users become at accommodating them.
Out on the street, there are plenty of vertical surfaces you can hit (lamp posts, trees, curb of the road, or just irregularities on the road surface)
That is why motorcyclists wear helmets, while pedestrians do not, although their center of gravity is higher than that of a motorcyclist.
Also, how does it know when to inflate? Can it be repacked?
It looks interesting, but I'll stick with my regular helmet for now, even if it isn't stylish.
And all in the interest of fashion? Ok, then I am Definitely not the target demographic. However, that model wearing that thing that looks like a cervical collar doesn't look very fashionable in my ignorant opinion.