A Look at Our Work with Sensor System Technology

How we use sensors in traumatic brain injury research

It’s been over a year since we first presented research on military helmet blunt impact testing and measuring head motion for traumatic brain injury (TBI) prevention. While much has happened in the world since then, we’ve kept up with our commitment to pursuing improvements to head protection through cutting-edge research.
 
Implementing sensor systems in impact testing is a key component of our next steps in the fight against TBI.
 
Our work with the PANTHER program through the Office of Naval Research (ONR) continues with goals to produce new insights in two key areas:

1. How TBIs form
2. Developing new helmet technologies to prevent them

At last year’s SHOT Show, we demonstrated a snapshot of our research using sensor systems inside combat helmets to extract acceleration data from impact tests.


Brown University continues to implement its algorithm for measuring head motion in impact testing using helmets Team Wendy outfitted with six sensors at precise coordinates. The goal is to be able to use the acceleration measurements at a few points on the head and feed them though an algorithm which allows the point data to be translated to a full picture of the head, including strains induced in brain tissue and the resulting risk of TBI. Our team is also looking into the lattice structures that we use to encase the sensors as a new alternative to foam helmet pads and liner systems.
 
Separate from PANTHER, a proposed upcoming sensor program in collaboration with Brown University named TIGER will further assist the ONR by exploring the stresses put on the human body when on a fast boat. A set of at least four sensors is affixed to a 3D-printed attachment to a simple baseball cap for monitoring accelerations. The sensors’ measurements are used to run calculations to determine what forces must have been imparted on a person upon impact and how those forces are distributed within the human body.

For example, we could take the head acceleration data and determine the stresses and strains that would result within the brain tissue, or take other measurements to deduce what forces would act on the spine.
 
By exploring how we can use sensor systems to collect and evaluate data, we hope to utilize these sensors to better predict brain injury as more detailed and accurate injury thresholds are established by the medical research community. This method of sensor analysis may also eventually be implemented within helmets used in the field.
 
The PANTHER program began in 2017, and ONR recently extended funding for another three years.  The new $5 million grant will help the research team study more related issues such as blast-induced head trauma and rotational head acceleration mitigation. The TIGER project is expected to kick off early this year as a two-year study.
 
By Ron Szalkowski
Director of Product Development and Research Collaboration