MIPS or Meh?

[fishwhisperer]

I've had a couple concussions (that I can recall) playing hockey growing up in Wisconsin... certainly enough to know that I'm not interested in more. Helmets in those days weren't very smart — pretty much just plastic shells with foam inside. When you got your bell rung, the helmet transferred everything to your skull, even just sliding onto the ice.

While getting knocked full-on can unavoidably lead to injury, you want the energy from glancing blows to go somewhere other than your brain. This is what I understand MIPS is going for, and for my money why risk it.

My hockey helmet has MIPS, my ski helmet has MIPS, and I bought my first MIPS bike helmet last year (Lazer Z1), and though I haven't crashed wearing it (yet), for the extra $10 the MIPS liner cost me it's worth the upcharge. It wouldn't surprise me if it's mandatory in some sports in the next few years. With all we know about concussions, why not throw the book at the problem? May not solve everything but it's a step in the right direction.

[11.4]

This discussion comes into the fore when talking about specialty helmets. There used to be a tendency to use long boat-tail helmets on the track more, but those have faded away, partly because riders realized that when you crashed, that tail could grab your head as it hit things and snap your head around so hard you had serious spine and brain damage. Now aero helmets are much shorter, like the Kask Bambino or the Casco series. Riders walked away from crashes wearing those because they protected without forcing your head to move.

The thing about MIPS on the road, say, is that there are two kinds of injury. One is the wide-angle snapping of the head. That one we can all agree we are aware of and worried about, and most helmets aren't going to stop that if it happens. But the other is the "bounce," or the relatively small movement of the head in any of a variety of directions. It doesn't take much movement allowed to mitigate that problem, and it doesn't take much of a movement to cause brain damage if it's happening fast. And that's where MIPS is probably most helpful. I wouldn't expect it to stop a 90 degree rotation of the head, but for a 5-10 degree rotation, which is your typical "bouncing along the road" crash, it could be quite useful.

Back to the track: With riders in helmets like the Bambino, I've seen fewer immediate post-crash triages that suggested dizziness, concussion, or the like. We saw more of those a few years ago, so I suspect that -- boat-tail aero helmets excluded -- MIPS is having some measure of success. It may not be everything we want, but it's something.

[batman1425]

Originally Posted by Mark McM

.Which leads me to one of my questions about MIPs: The MIPs implementations I've seen add a polymer sheet as a thin layer between the head and inner surface of the helmet. This layer is supposed to allow sliding between the head and the helmet, so that the helmet can rotate independent of the head - almost as if the head and helmet were a ball and socket, and the polymer sheet were a lubricating layer.

But here's the thing: My head isn't a perfect sphere, and neither is the inside of my helmet. When my helmet is held snugly to my head, there are many directions the helmet can't rotate, even with the MIPs layer to reduce friction. The MIPS implementation where there is a helmet-within-a-helmet might work, because you shape the interface between the inner and outer helmets like a sphere, allowing it to rotate in any direction. But I question that the thin polymer layer implementation of MIPs will be nearly as effective.

My MIPS synthe will move in a number of directions with it snugly fit, but I agree there are limits to that movement from a directional perspective. I think this is a technical challenge of making something that will fit a variety of dissimilar non-spherical heads while still offering a metered amount of directional movement. You want it to move some, but not so much that the movement leaves some part of the head exposed after the initial impact. Some folks could likely benefit from additional movement depending on their specific dimenstions I think the tech and amount of movement as it stands is a middle ground to account for differences user dimensions.