Slashdot Mirror
Building a Better Bike Helmet Out of Paper
An anonymous reader writes "Inspired by nature, a London man believes the solution to safer bike helmets is to build them out of paper. '"The animal that stood out was the woodpecker. It pecks at about ten times per second and every time it pecks it sustains the same amount of force as us crashing at 50 miles per hour," says Surabhi. "It's the only bird in the world where the skull and the beak are completely disjointed, and there's a soft corrugated cartilage in the middle that absorbs all the impact and stops it from getting a headache." In order to mimic the woodpecker's crumple zone, Anirudha turned to a cheap and easily accessible source — paper. He engineered it into a double-layer of honeycomb that could then be cut and constructed into a functioning helmet. "What you end up with is with tiny little airbags throughout the helmet," he says.'"
I'd say it's the article at fault not the designer, but the reason polystyrene foam is already used in bike helmets is exactly the same - "tiny little airbags throughout the helmet".
I wonder how this compares? Does this absorb more energy?
And most of you survived to adulthood -- although, as your post illustrates, some did suffer lasting cognitive issues.
Paper had one characteristic that might make it less than suitable for use in rain. One foam helmet might be cheaper in the long run than a bunch of soggy paper helmets.
Sometimes it`s not your fault.
The name is Hövding and it's an "Airbag bicycle helmet". It's developed by some team in Skåne, Sweden. Looks really cool.
As has been posted to Slashdot before, the data on helmet protection is equivocal. In many large scale studies, increase in helmet use does not reduce severe brain injuries, and could possibly increase the rate.
Why? 1) Helmets might make bikers less cautious; 2) helmets might make car drivers less cautious; 3) a helmet can only absorb so much energy, and in many categories of severe crashes you're going to cross the threshold of severe brain injury regardless of a helmet (in other words the range of energies a helmet can protect you from might not overlap well with the kinds of crashes you need to worry about).
None of the reasons you post support your suggestion that helmet use does not reduce severe brain injuries or actually increase it. They are ludicrous at best.
In 30 years on a bike, I've never ever seen someone say, oh, I have this helmet, lets see if I can skid right under that semi and out the other side. People who take ridiculous risks will take them without helmets just as often as with.
The research only supports one assertion about increased injuries caused by helmets, and that is a marginal increase in neck injuries from the helmet catching on the roadway surface as you go sliding along. However, even this research recognizes this increase in neck injuries is a trade off compared to abraded to the bone head road-rash that would otherwise occur in the identical crash.
That being said, when broadsided by a semi, a helmet won't help you. And its probably pointless to require them by law.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I hate to say it, but my impression is that linking to http://cyclehelmets.org/ for issues of helmets is like linking to WUWT for issues on climate change. It has a particular position, and runs with it (whether that is intentional or not). They are by no means unique in this, and are also not the only position in the discussion to do it.
That said:
1. Dumb cyclists will be dumb, and if someone rides less cautiously because they think a helmet will protect them they are dumb
2. Dumb drivers will be dumb, and if a driver is really driving less cautiously around a cyclist on the basis that a helmet will protect the cyclist they are not only dumb but outright dangeous
3. Crossing the threshold with 100% of the force is still probably going to be more damaging than crossing it with 50% of the force (if 50% is absorbed by the helmet)
4. And many are caused by non-rotational impacts, which helmets reduce
5. Dumb cyclists are dumb, and if the pool of cyclists is largely made up of dumb cyclists then that doesn't mean helmets reduce safety, just that if a bunch of less dumb cyclists were added to the pool they would dilute the apparent stupidity of the group overall. Not saying cyclists are stupid, but rather that the number of stupid cyclists is the same irrespective of whether it is 100 stupid cyclists in 101 total cyclists, or 100 stupid cyclists in 1000 total cyclists.
6. If #5 is in fact true (and there is little agreement on it) then this is true, and indeed having more cyclists on the road very likely does make it safer for all cyclists.
There in another arguments for not requiring helmets, also based on the idea that requiring helmets reduces the number of cyclists: even if helmets do reduce the likelihood of death or brain injury in an accident, the advantage of improvement in overall community health as a result of more cyclists offsets the disadvantage of a subset of these being dead or brain injured.
The science is not a slam dunk for helmets. In many studies--including more recent studies, and meta-studies--helmets increase the injury rate. But even assuming that helmets provide a significant net benefit for cyclists, the reduction in cyclists caused by helmet laws definitely outweighs the benefits of helmets, because the injury rate is so low even without helmets that you're better off having a bunch of helmet-less cyclists losing weight and increasing their cardiovascular health.
Once again intuition and anecdote provide the wrong answer.
People eschewed seat belts for similar reasons--intuitively everybody thought that a seat belt would increase injury by preventing you from escaping from a wreckage, or by keeping you in a poor position.
People: stop using your intuition for this kind of stuff, and read up on real science. And also be critical of the science, because too often even scientists inadvertently seek to prove their intuition, rather than asking the hard questions. In the case of helmets, the emerging, qualitatively better science casts serious doubt on the overall benefits of helmets from an epidemiological perspective.
Helmets will help prevent cuts and mild concussions, but not serious head injuries with permanent damage, which they might even exacerbate. And helmet requirements disincentivize cycling to an extent that they often cause a negative net health outcome in the population.
Takeaway: helmet laws are definitely a bad idea. If you wear a helmet, good for you, but don't judge others who don't.
Also, 4) many severe head injuries from cycling crashes are caused by rotational forces, which helmets can exacerbate. 5) helmet requirements almost universally reduce the number of cyclists (or reduce the growth in cycling), leaving the cycling pool with more adventurous and risk-prone bikers; 6) corollary of #5, fewer cyclists means less road time experience between cyclists and car drivers.
See http://cyclehelmets.org/.
You're just trying to rationalize your personal dislike for helmets.
Saying helmets don't protect your head is like saying water isn't wet. It's fucking risible. Trying to prove helmets don't protect by using statistics from different groups (cyclists who wear helmets are a different type of rider from cyclists who don't) smacks of desperation.
Tell you what. I get to smack you upside your granite skull with a car door. You can put on a helmet or not. Your choice.
But the brain damage has already been done.
Your post is based on the assumption that car-cyclist collisions are the only significant kind of accident.
I've gone down because of ice (x2), rain, and recklessness. If you'll look up the statistics, you'll see that borne out in the larger numbers as well.
And human-caused climate change is real. Watch insurance prices rather than listening to politicians that are owned by the oil and coal industries.
I actually thought about that. However, there are very few cost effective methods of waterproofing paper that work. Think of the waterproof corrugated paper packaging you have seen. It is fine for short exposure; but, it does not hold up to prolonged immersion and exposure.
A bike helmet will sit in puddles; it will spend hours in downpours. If you waterproof for the exposure conditions that bicycle helmets see, at some point it ceases to be paper.
Why do these arguments sound so familiar? Probably because they're so similar to the arguments people used to make against seat belts.
"They'll increase accidents because they make it harder for drivers to stretch and look around!"
"They'll trap me in a burning or sinking car!"
And, my all-time personal favorite (yes, I've actually heard people say this):
"They'll prevent me from being thrown clear of the collision!"
People will persistently find the very stupidest reasons for not doing something that bugs them. Yes, each of these eventualities might have killed a few drivers who would've been spared if not for their safety belts. But those numbers are absolutely dwarfed by the number of lives saved and serious injuries prevented.
I've only been in one significant bike accident, and I was lucky enough in that one that my helmet didn't come into play. But looking back at the accident and the pattern of my injuries, I can't explain how the helmet was spared. I sure as hell am not tempted at this point to ride out without it.
After RTFA, it seems that the most obvious material to make the helmet from is woodpecker skulls. Didn't anyone else get that?
Corrugated cardboard has been used for decades under high-altitude scientific balloon payloads to absorb the impact of landing from a parachute descent. You don't have to put too many of them under several thousand pounds of experiment and gondola. Here is a (not so good) picture of one example. The cardboard provides a very nice low-gee impact.
There are actually helmets designed to reduce the rotational forces though. For example, I remember my own university trumpeting one helmet design in which a kind of inner helmet was allowed to slide inside an outer helmet on a low-friction liner. Simulations demonstrated a reduction maximum strain forces on the brain. There's a presentation on it here by the company which now manufactures them: http://mipshelmet.com/how-it-works/the_invention and since it's a simple design I suspect that it will be a component of the helmet of the future.
However, honeycombs make excellent single-use shock absorbers, so those surely have a place in helmets as well.
Even if the site you link to were reasonable there is every reason to believe that helmets can be made truly excellent and made to give incredible protection both against shocks and rotational forces.
I am a regular biker — At least three days a week, I cycle to work. Not a great distance, but I end up making ~1hr on the bike every day I use it.
Several years ago, a car hit laterally my rear tire. Quite slowly, fortunately, although it managed to bend the rim ~30 degrees. Of course, cycling at ~20Km/h (~12mph), I fell down to my left.
I stood up right away, scared but not hit. My pants were slightly torn over the pocket where I store my keys. Nothing happened to me, just a scare, right?
When I took my helmet off, it was split in two. Yes, helmets are (and are designed to be) quite more fragile than skulls. Still, I'm very happy I didn't have to land with the side of my head on the road. Were I to be lucky, I'd have an ugly scar on my front left side.
Wear a helmet. Always.
Responding to oneself is generally bad form, but:
http://www.badscience.net/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2013-12-13-17.12.05.png
In summary (and partially concordant with the person I initially criticised): On a community-wide level, requiring people wear helmets may not reduce head injuries, but on an individual level if you are cycling and can add a helmet to your cycling without changing your behaviour, you are probably safer with the helmet.
(This requires a bit of reading into the paper, and a couple of assumptions: Assumptions are: drivers don't suddenly start being dickheads around you because you're wearing a helmet, and you don't start being a dickhead because you put on a helmet. If those two hold, then the case-control rather than community-wide studies are more applicable to the individual choosing whether or not to wear a helmet).
Looks like it has a fatal flaw or two.
It's no great trick to make a helmet which will absorb impact. The trick is to do it without too much weight and, unless you only ride in cold weather, without overheating your head. In general, the more you pay for a helmet, the less helmet and more hole you get. That thing is covered with a solid shell. No venting. It's a portable oven. It's also 535g -- about 1.2 pounds. It's a brick (and probably will contribute to neck injuries as a result).
Giro's cheapest MTB helmet has some vents and is 410g. Move up to a helmet you might actually wear in the heat, you've got almost as much vent as helmet and you're down to 316g. Go to one which costs as much as this one -- 80 pounds sterling -- and you're under 300g and have more holes than helmet.
If it was just unventilated it might still have its niche, but it's just too heavy.
They argued against it in the beginning. I remember reading about those idiots, and even now, there are people who'd use those arguments. They need to be loudly and derisively laughed at.
Hitting something going downhill at high speed is going to cause brain damage or worse whether you have a helmet or not. Crashing on descents is very, very bad news.
Styrofoam will only protect you in low speed collisions. Somebody was killed in the Giro d'Italia last year descending from hitting his head on a siderail. He was wearing a helmet, of course.
This is the problem with these kind of anecdotes: If somebody crashes wearing a helmet, and is OK, it's just assumed that the helmet saved him. If somebody is hurt and was not wearing a helmet, it's assumed that he would have been ok if he was. In reality, this is a completely fallacious assumption, and is not borne out by the data.
Helmets probably have a positive impact on low speed crashes, but it is small. Motorists would have significantly reduced fatalities if they wore motorcycle helmets (which are much more effective but impractical for bicycles), like race car drivers do, but they don't. Pedestrians have higher fatalities per kilometer than cyclists (and pedestrian fatalities are often due to brain damage), but they don't wear helmets. Why is this one activity singled out to wear a bulky safety yarmulke?
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Don't confuse the questions of "should I wear a helmet" with "should helmets be compulsory".
Same with drugs - laws can make things worse, despite good intentions.
No it isn't. If somebody crashes wearing a helmet and the side of the helmet is smashed in but the rider is OK then it's assumed that the helmet saved them. That happens enough for it to be worth it.
I remember hearing this same stupid argument about motorcycle helmets, seatbelts and lawnmowers with naked blades. An easily complied with safety feature does not have to stop 100% of injuries to be worth it.
Well, given we know the forces and situations involved: Helmets are clearly only addressing the symptom of the bigger problem.
The solution is to correct the design flaw and build structures where the chest houses the brain instead of a ridiculous appendage.
If input lag was a problem then why put the visual cortex in the back of the skull, and motor cortex so far from the feet?
Let's upgrade to impact resistant brains and bodies that can survive in the vacuum of space while we're at it.
Intelligently Designed... Pah!
He was talking about helmet-vs-no-helmet, not trad-helmet-vs-paper-helmet.
If you're cycling at 30MPH, come off cornering on ice, and hit your head on a kerb, a helmet may well save your life.
I do have quite a lot of sympathy for the view that there are circumstances where a fall is so unlikely that a helmet is a waste of time -- cycling in light traffic, with warm dry weather and no recklessness.
I finally bought a comfortable helmet, and since it's comfortable I always wear it. It's easier to do that than to evaluate the conditions every morning.