HealthTECH Challenge series<\/a>, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety.\n <\/p>\n\n The challenge invites inventors, engineers, startups, academic teams and established companies to improve the impact protection and design of football helmets through improvements to how facemasks absorb and reduce the effects of contact on the field.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to get this out through all the channels we typically do to try to engage, not necessarily the helmet industry alone, but engineers, engineering schools, people involved in material science and others,\u201d Jeff Miller, the NFL\u2019s executive vice president overseeing player health and safety, said at the innovation summit. \u201cThey might have different ideas around architecture, might have different idea around materials. Participate in this, make your ideas win a prize. I hope, like we\u2019ve done in the past, that this is going to advance the thinking.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Most progress on helmet safety has come from improvements to the shell and padding, helping to reduce the overall rate of concussions. Working with the helmet industry, the league has brought in position-specific helmets, with those for quarterbacks, for example, having more padding in the back after data showed most concussions for QBs came when the back of the head slammed to the turf.\n <\/p>\n
\n But the facemask has mostly remained the same. This past season, 44% of in-game concussions resulted from impact to the player\u2019s facemask, up from 29% in 2015, according to data gathered by the NFL.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWhat we haven\u2019t seen over that period of time are any changes of any note to the facemask,\u201d Miller said. \u201cAs a football fan, if you look back five or seven years ago, it looks exactly the same as it was before. It\u2019s made up of the same materials. \u2026 Now we see, given the changes in our concussion numbers and injuries to players, that as changes are made to the helmet, fewer and fewer concussions are caused by hits to the shell, and more and more concussions as a percentage are by hits to the facemask.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Arik Armstead, an 11-year veteran defensive lineman, was also part of the panel and said he welcomed change. Armstead recently changed helmets to a model deemed safer by testing.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThis is awesome,\u201d he said. \u201cI think a lot is happening in our approach to improving these things. A challenge like this is amazing because you\u2019re bringing solicited, new creative minds into the process. \u2026 Let\u2019s bring some different brains and minds into the equation and see what could be possible. I think it\u2019s really cool.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Selected winners will receive up to $100,000 in aggregate funding, as well as expert development support to help move their concepts from the lab to the playing field.\n <\/p>\n
\n The winner will be picked in August and Miller said he expected helmet manufacturers to start implementing any improvements into helmets soon after that.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NFL is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":456860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-456859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}