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news
White cycle helmetCycle helmets have "major flaws" in safety, insists cyclist airbag firm Hövding (+ video)
Hövding, the Swedish company behind the so-called “airbag for cyclists,” claims that there are “major flaws” in the design of traditional cycle helmets. It has also produced a film to back up its assertion, with the title Cycle Helmet Safety – What the industry doesn’t want you to know.
Cycle helmets sold in the EU are required to meet the EN1078 standard in order to secure the CE marking that shows they comply with it.
Helmets, attached to a dummy head, are dropped from a height of 1.5 metres onto an anvil. The force of the impact to the head must not exceed 250g (the acceleration measured by G force).
But Hövding argues that the upper limit is “alarmingly high and is clearly above the level of force that would cause injury. This means that helmets that meet the current statutory requirement of 250g may still result in serious or even fatal head injuries in a cycle accident,” it says in this video.
The company says that a 2012 test on its airbag – deployed from a collar worn round the neck – demonstrated that it “had over three times as much shock-absorbing capacity as the best traditional cycle helmet,” with the force of impact standing at 60g.
"Hövding is the biggest thing since the emergence of the cycle helmet and, as a milestone, is equivalent to when the airbag was developed for cars", commented the insurer’s head of division traffic safety & environment, Maria Krafft.
“The harmful effects of Folksam's impact test have now been analysed,” says Hövding, although it gives no details of the methodology used.
“They show that, with a traditional cycle helmet in this type of accident, the likelihood of serious head injury is approximately 90% and the risk of a fatal injury is as high as 30%. The use of an airbag cycle helmet in the same accident dramatically reduces the risk of injury. The risk of serious head injury is then only 2% and the risk of a fatal injury almost non-existent.
“The permitted maximum value for cycle helmets is alarmingly high, which means that a rider can still suffer serious head injuries in an accident wearing a helmet that meets the current legal requirement of 250g,” it adds.
Ms Krafft said: “'Best practice' is often chosen as the norm in consumer tests that drive development forward. This means that there is now no reason to maintain the 250 g limit for an approved helmet."
Stig Håkansson, former director of product safety at the Swedish Consumer Agency, added: "I have spent much of my professional life working on product safety at national and international level and I have never seen a cycle helmet that provided anything like the level of protection that the Hövding provides. Naturally I hope it will be used by a lot of people in the future.
Hövding’s insistence that the 250g impact force limit be brought down is likely to be challenged by helmet manufacturers, and some people might suggest that the primary motivation of the company making these claims is to raise the profile of its own product – and sell more of them.
As for the assertion at the beginning of the video that “this is information that has never been communicated before,” the large body of academic research on the subject of the efficacy of cycle helmets, and the debate that surrounds the whole issue, suggests otherwise.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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52 comments
I caught the documentary of James Cracknell cycling across America and getting hit in the back of the head by a lorries wing mirror. Good job he was not relying on one these. Also wonder how they would fair if you dropped your bike on a bend?
They compare their device to typical bicycle helmets and with little "testing" detail. I suspect you could wear a motorcycle helmet if you wanted "better" protection (or even a full-face bike helmet).
This device has been around awhile, but seems to put a PR push on every now and then. The cost makes it a non-starter, I think, and I have serious questions about its ability to protect from a secondary impact (fall off bike, hit road, slide, hit kerb).
And note airbags in cars are secondary protection - seatbelts are your primary protection. Many auto accidents involve multiple impacts (collision with another car then with a second car or tree, armco, etc.) The airbags only work once.
Forget helmets, the only way to get an adequate level of safety on a bike is to fit it with a roll cage.
On a more serious note, the ad misrepresents what the anvil tests are for. When you crash, most of your speed is parallel to the road, not perpendicular to it. So the speed your helmet is designed to handle is only a few mph, NOT the speed you ride at; and the 20kph test reflects this. Consider that motorbikes go a heck of a lot faster than us, and their helmets aren't much more sturdy. This is what wikipedia says on MC helmet testing:
Point has already been made but the fact that a helmet won't stop me getting injured if someone drops an anvil on my head from 1.5m isn't a reason not to wear a helmet. The number of bike accidents that involve hitting the ground in the manner that approximates a CE test is, I would imagine (based on anecdote, not evidence - so I wouldn't believe me either!), quite small.
At the risk of doing what I said you shouldn't, CE certified helmets are cheap (you can get an admittedly pretty ugly one that meets the anvil test from Decathlon for £12.99). Surely at that price it doesn't have to make much of a marginal difference - say, be ever so slightly useful in the event of a side impact, which in my anecdotal experience is much more common when you crash your bike - to be worth wearing one? At least that's the maths I do.
I don't think I've suffered any "negative health effects" as a result of "helmet compulsion". Having grown up there when the laws were introduced (yes, I am really that old), I think the Australian studies are also of questionable value. If they could adjust the figures for the decline in cycling in Australia to remove the effect of increased traffic in urban areas (combined with larger vehicles) and the increasingly sedentary nature of Australians generally (this isn't just about cycling, Australians stopped exercising across the board; they didn't get fat solely because they stopped riding bikes, they got fat (boy, did they got fat) because they stopped doing pretty much any form of exercise at all) then I might be prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, when inflated the Huffding looks like a puffa jacket for the head. Maybe useful on those really cold winter commutes.
It is not the cost which stops me wearing a helmet. I just don't think that cycling is significantly more dangerous than walking or driving ( you can check the figures yourself).
You obviously have never bothered to look at the Australian studies. The researchers were competent enough to take into account the numbers cycling. Likewise changes in drivers' behaviour and in the road environment were examined by tracking changes in pedestrian casualty rates. They changed in step with cycling casualty rates, without the benefit of foam.
Even the absolute figures for cyclist casualties changed very little, in spite of the large reduction in cycling.
Of course there are other reasons for increasing obesity, but large decreases in the amount of cycling are not helpful, especially as commuting or riding to the shops are easily incorporated into daily routine, but taking part in a sport or going to the gym ( I could not face that sort of exercise, much too boring)
require a special decision and time set aside.
The studies are available on http://www.cyclehelmets.org/ but rather than check them you are so convinced that helmets work that you assume there must be faults in them. The faults you guess at are not there.
I, and many others, have been riding lidless for years and it is up to you to make a case for helmets if you want to convince or force us to wear them.
Australia is several times more dangerous than Britain for cyclists, and much more dangerous than the Netherlands or Denmark. It did not improve at all when the Law was enacted.
The debate around wearing helmets is errily reminiscent of Northern Ireland inasmuch as no participant seems willing to accept that the other might have a valid point of view, there's no "right" answer and if we all let everyone decide for themselves we'd probably all be a lot happier. I am going to keep wearing a helmet (most of the time anyway, maybe not when I ride my shop bike to the pub) and I intend to make my kids wear them. You are all welcome to do whatever you want. I will not be buying an airbag for my neck.
[oops]
Bears "shit in woods", insists ursine behavioural specialists.
I have been clipped by cars twice (both left hooks), both times the fall was mitigated and the impact on my arms (total three fractures and one insurance payout.) Meanwhile I have had several spills on ice and one on bird shit that saw me crash over. One time I just came to a normal stop in the middle of the road at a queue of cars, instead of a trackstand the bike went sideways on ice (crash at 0kph, embarrassing!)
In all these cases the first thing to go to ground is your arms, knees, hips/arse, rear hanger (twice to my cost.) The idea that your head falls vertically from two metres under gravity is totally wrong. A normal helmet will protect you from a normal mitigated fall, your body is your own crumple zone. No-one should think that a helmet is good for a head on collision at speed with a vehicle. If you come around a corner in the countryside and the road is covered in dung or ice or gravel your helmet is there for you.
So the idea that an icy patch on the way to work might cost me £300 in a non accident where I don't hit my head makes this a non starter. It might make me slow down a bit for fear of the cost, but not many have money to waste like this. And besides, my helmets are cool!
And there is the problem. Helmets are marketed so much as the magic talisman which will stop you getting hurt. Disclaimer: I wear one when cycling, cos my wife said she'd kill me if I got hurt on my bike and wasn't wearing a helmet
I'll see your http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000145751400061X and raise you a http://www.ecf.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Cycle-helmets.pdf
: -P
Seriously for every study there's an opposing one and at some point a rebuttal. That's partly why the helmet debate is so difficult.
But if you want 3 times the protection from a helmet the Kranium apparently is the answer and for much less money than the Hövding.
And if what you really want is safer cycling work on reducing speed limits, getting cars off the road, educating road users to share the road, separating motor vehicle traffic, cycle traffic and pedestrian traffic at points of conflict, etc etc.
Except that those studies are in no way contradictory, they're just saying very different things, and if you focus on issues that matter, for example, what has the most positive impact on the population's overall health, there's not much of a debate to be had.
The first study says "if you fall off a bike, you're better off wearing a helmet".
The second study says "even with the risk of falling off, riding a bike is much better for your health than not riding a bike, and the benefit of wearing a helmet is negligible compared to the negative impact that helmet compulsion has on the number of people riding bikes".
pdw: The first study says "if you fall off a bike, you're better off wearing a helmet".
No, that's not what the first study says. It says "Under ideal laboratory conditions, in the exact kind of impacts that helmets are designed for, helmets are very effective at absorbing accelerations".
Real world crashes however are not always under the ideal conditions for helmets (e.g. witness the many "my helmet broke!" anecdotes, which actually indicate the helmet failed). Some significant problems in the real-world:
* Impacts can have strong off-centre components, that then induce rotational acceleration of the head and brain. Rotational acceleration can cause more brain injury at a lower g.
* Helmets increase the width of the head. This means they can turn a *no*-blow into a glancing blow, and a glancing blow into a heavy blow. Further, the added width of the helmet can increase the leverage a blow has to rotate the head.
Rotational accelerations are bad for the brain, rotational force to the head can also lead to neck injuries. There is strong evidence that helmet wearers have increased rates of neck injuries.
These likely are factors (amongst many others) in why, in the real-world, cycle helmets have not had lead to the dramatic decrease in cyclist KSI rates in those nations where helmet usage became very common which you'd expect if the laboratory tests of helmets applied meaningfully to the real-world.
Fair point, but it doesn't alter the fact that any benefit that helmet may have in the event of an accident is completely dwarfed by the negative health effects of helmet compulsion, and the helmet "debate" is a total red herring in terms of road safety.
The greatest worry I have in the event of a crash at speed is indeed rotational forces my brain would experience. I know- because it has. My head + helmet is round and, like a ball, rotated on impact with the ground when I was moving forward at 25mph. Having hit the car pulling out in front of me I hit the deck head-first and rolled. The result was shearing forces which caused the permanent loss of some cognitive functions and my sense of taste and smell. No worries, I'm still alive and able to ride a bike despite being unable to taste Gu.
However had I had slipped on oil doing a track stand waiting for the lights to change and banged my head on the curb a helmet might have helped. Some 'bouncing' of my brain within the cranium would undoubtedly have occurred but it's less likely that fractures would result (I had 7 of them)
Strikes me that we are looking for a helmet which does a number things. And I don't think such a helmet currently exists. It needs to:
Absorb impact by deforming or expanding in the event of a direct strike.
Have a bit of a slippery surface so that it doesn't stick to the road
Stick to your head at several strategic points
Be thin enough to avoid the leverage issues noted in Paul J's excellent post
-and of course be comfortable, aerodynamic, ventilated, light, reasonably priced, not nerdy and patented by me so that I can retire from a job in which I have to treat cats with head trauma after being shut inside a washing machine
Cyclingscience:
The title of that paper, "Bicycle helmets are highly effective at preventing head injury" is more than a little misleading. Nowhere do they actually evaluate the effect on head injuries, rather they are evaluating the change in acceleration on head-form drops, and extra-polating that to what they think the effect might be on head injuries.
A better title would be "Helmets are effective at reducing acceleration to the head, under the laboratory conditions regulations require helmets to be effective in". This isn't really new, we already knew these helmets do that. Note that, just as Hövding say, the accelerations they observed, 181g +, are still extremely high. You would not want be to exposed to these impacts, with or without helmet.
The thing is that in the real-world, in population-wide studies, we do simply do not see anywhere near the same level of benefits of helmets. If the study you cite were correct in its title claim, there's no way the dutch (with their very low helmet usage rates) should be getting better safety than in the UK/USA - despite the slightly generally more unsafe conditions in the latter two countries. There's simply no way that injury rates amongst several groups in AU and NZ could have gone up /after/ the introduction of the helmet law, if they had such amazing real-world safety benefits.
Controlled laboratory conditions with impacts and measurements that are /idealised/ to what helmets can do simply don't translate well to the real-world - real-world data seems to be very clear on that.
I have links to studies and figures in my blog, and in comments to it, at: http://paul.jakma.org/2011/10/28/the-case-against-bicycle-helmets-quick-...
So, do we believe a commercial company or do we believe research scientists? Only last week scientists published research confirming 100% the efficacy of helmets.
It's likely that Hövding hasn't seen the most recent paper, published online in the peer-reviewed journal Accident Analysis & Injury Prevention, starkly titled "Bicycle helmets are highly effective at preventing head injury during head impact: Head-form accelerations and injury criteria for helmeted and unhelmeted impacts".
The paper is by people who work in engineering, orthopaedics and biomechanics and who don't appear to have a vested interest in airbags.
They conclude that helmets reduced peak accelerations in all impacts, helmets reduced head injury criteria in all impacts and, overall, helmets reduced risk of injury.
If anyone has contact with Hövding, tell them they can read it at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000145751400061X
Wow __ that 'report' is a real glimpse into the future! It's actually dated Sept 2014.
It looks like the numbers (HIC values etc) in this paper are similar to the ones Hövding quote in their video for 'normal' helmets, so they aren't saying that normal helmets don't work at all, they are saying theirs works much better. And let's face it, if you do hit your head you would rather be wearing a helmet than nothing, and at the point your face is heading to the tarmac you'd rather it was a massive puffed-up airbag than a little piece of EPS.
Of course this is just more food for the helmet compulsion lobby which can't get past the notion that making everyone wear helmets would save some number of lives a year, to the likelihood that less people would cycle leading to more deaths by loss of 'critical mass of cyclists numbers', more deaths via obesity, heart disease, more congestion, more pollution (more deaths) and so on....
The ideal answer still remains to reduce accidents
We have known for years that this sort of study shows that helmets ought to reduce head injuries and deaths.
We also know that the real life "experiments" in making cyclists wear helmets have failed to reduce the rate of head injuries and deaths in every country where mandatory helmet laws have been tried.
Here is one example.
http://rdrf.org.uk/2013/12/17/the-effects-of-new-zealands-cycle-helmet-law/
It would be more useful to look into the disparty between theory and practice, in order to find out why mass helmet wearing does not have the expected result.
To carry on doing this sort of study will not tell us anything about why some countries have failed to reduce their very high cyclist casualty rates by forcing cyclists to wear helmets.
I call complete and utter bullshit on that 'study'. As the entire academic world did on the Thompson-Ravera 'study' of twenty years ago, that gave us the zombie statistic that helmets prevented 88% of head injuries.
If helmets work, why after NZ made them law with 95% compliance, did relative risk of injury *double*? Same in Australia.
Also, cycling halved.
Fight anything at all, from anyone, that says helmets are a good thing for anything other than competitive sports.
Because a helmet reducing the risk or level of head injury *in the event of* an accident is not the same thing as reducing the overall risk of head injury to a cyclist.
There are lots of reasons why this might be, including loss of the critical mass effect, risk compensation by cyclists, risk compensation by motorists, or change of the risk profile of the remaining cyclists (i.e. the cyclists that aren't put off by a wearing a helmet were the ones taking higher risks anyway).
None of this makes the study bullshit, it's just a matter of understanding what the scope of a study is, and what conclusions you can reasonably make from it.
I'm afraid you are wrong and this report is complete and utter bullshit. Anything with a title of "Bicycle helmets are highly effective at preventing head injury" which only examines laboratory data without reference to real life effects cannot make categorical statements like this title, it is definitively bullshit.
The digest says ".......the majority of epidemiological literature suggests that helmets effectively reduce risk of injury." No they don't.
And as someone else has already pointed out, it's hard to understand how they have reached their conclusions when the report won't be published for six months.
To be honest, bullshit is a compliment.
These look to be excellent. How many of you that drive cars would buy one without airbags ? If it saved my life I'd be happy to spend the necessary wedge on one.
[[[[[ I feel there's an enormous "if" there, for 300 smackers!
P.R.
At the risk of going O/T, I would, quite happily. I'd far rather effective seatbelts - and indeed the cars I've felt safest in have lacked airbags. They have four-point harnesses instead, so admittedly a fringe case.
I'd echo vbvb's sentiment - the medical evidence might be reasonably clear that helmets help (on an individual level rather than a state level - real life is full of messy stuff like that, and the people who scare me are the ones who don't understand that), but it's still worrying how little interest the manufacturers have in improving their designs. If I saw pictures of a safety product I'd made that had cracked - when it's trivial to work out that it would perform best by crushing - all over the internet, I'd be trying to figure out what went wrong. That doesn't seem to be happening.
No comments on how the thing looks but it's a bit dorky. Plus I'd guess it's a sweat factory in the warm climates. If they can get one to look more like an actual helmet and have the price drop a bit that would help but that doesn't look likely.
On the plus side, it would be nice not to have something covering my head like a traditional helmet but the neck brace look/feel and mass is not attractive.
Some of us think that cycling helmets "look a bit dorky" anyway. On a scale of 'dorkiness' I'd say that the air-bag collar (uninflated) is a lot less that most cycling helmets. Obviously, when it is inflated, then it is so dorky that it is off the scale.
Ahh.. maybe you're right. Perhaps it just depends on who's wearing it.
http://girlonthecontrary.com/2010/08/07/bobblehead-neck-brace/
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