The History of Virginia Tech's Helmet Lab with Stefan Duma

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Travis Williams

If you pay attention to any sort of sport on really any level, you're probably well aware that we collectively take head injuries far more seriously today than we did maybe two decades ago.

In a relatively short amount of time, we've moved beyond having a part -time coach tell you to rub some dirt on it and get back in the game no matter how bad you were hurting. Not that I personally had that experience or anything. To a place where we not only now have research -backed procedures that dictate when players can return to games, they're also influencing how practices are structured and the equipment that's used on the field.

You probably know a lot of this already, but how much do you know about Virginia Tech's role at the forefront of a lot of these changes? Well, I got to talk to Virginia Tech's Stefan Duma about this very subject. Stefan is a university distinguished professor and the Harry Wyatt Professor of Engineering, as well as the director of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science and the founder of the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab.

At this point the helmet lab, the work they do and the ratings that they produce are extremely well known not only by athletic departments but by the average consumer.

Stefan told me their website gets about 5 ,000 visits a day, and when they release a new helmet rating, that number can shoot well over 200 ,000. So we chatted a little about how he got started investigating head injuries in football and how that's expanded to other sports. We also talked about how this study and this work has changed the way practices are done at even the youth level, and ultimately how this work has raised our collective consciousness and really changed how we all watch sports.

I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

Travis

I'm just really curious how you got into studying helmets.

Stefan

Well, my background is really automobile safety. So my PhD program, I helped design side airbags for Honda. This was in the late 90s when airbags were just being put into cars. And so that was my PhD dissertation was basically building the side airbag platform for Honda to keep people safe and to protect their arms and limbs. And from there, I went into doing a lot of military research, so protecting soldiers, particularly in helicopter crashes. So we developed airbag systems for helicopters. So when pilots would crash, the systems could deploy and protect them because helicopters crashed a lot like car crashes. And it was actually from a military conference. I was down in San Juan, Puerto Rico in February 2003 at a conference talking about biomechanics for military and there was a vendor there who had just developed this really small low -power accelerometer and I went up to him and I talked to him and I said, hey, you know, I think we can put these in football helmets. This will be great. Six months later, we were the first team ever to instrument their football players and, you know, it took a lot of people. We've had a great team. People always ask, well, how did you do this, you know, two decades ago, 2003?

There's really three reasons. One, we had this engineering technology that was great. But the other two parts that were equally important is we had a great sports medicine, Mike Goforth, Gunnar Bollinson, they were all on board at Virginia Tech. And really Frank Beamer was on board. And if we didn't have all three of those, this wouldn't happen. And a lot of my peers at other universities, the coach is just like, no, don't touch the players. Don't fuss with anybody on the field. And we're behind the scenes, so we don't really interact directly that much. But it really took all three and it really took Beamer saying, okay, we're going to do this because it's good for player safety. And that's why Virginia Tech was the first to do this, which is now very common. Now there's teams from grade school, high school, college, all across the boards using this instrumentation package that we helped develop way back when. That's fascinating.

Travis

What made you think of football helmets when you were at that military conference?

Stefan

Well, it's interesting. The other kind of thing that happened that's very unique is VCOM started in the same timeframe. So I started at Virginia Tech in 2000. And about a year later, VCOM was being born and they brought in Gunnar Brolinson. He was our head team physician for the football team. Well, Gunner and I started collaborating on a range of projects outside of football. So he was helping us on our auto safety front and he was helping us. He's the ski physician for the U .S. Olympics. And so he and I were brainstorming lots of ideas and it was really that partnership that allowed us to start. And actually VCOM paid for the original sensors that we bought in 2003. They realized it was right away going to be a very effective way to understand brain injury in humans. So it was sort of a lot of things mixed together to allow us to move forward way back then.

Travis

Yeah. And so I guess it was, this was also would have been in like the rise of Virginia Tech football prominence as well. When you came here in 2000, we'd just have gone to the national championship. And so I guess football was on a lot of people's brains, literally.

Stefan

Right. Right. When I started here was Michael Vick. You know, that was the Michael Vick era. Yeah, it was huge prominence. Then you go into Tyrod Taylor, you go into some of the legends that played here. So I can't underscore enough how important Frank Beamer was to this because we were playing for national championships. It was a high stress, super high stress situation. Not that it isn't now, but it was very, very stressful and a lot of coaches you know, wanted nothing to do with any outside research, you know, just let the players focus on football only. But we've been very active. We've had great sports medicine led by Mike Goforth and the team there. Mark Rogers is now the team physician and they've just been wonderful, especially now that we've expanded. So we started with football, but since then we've gone into women's lacrosse, women's soccer, women's rugby, and we're instrumenting female athletes to really understand. What's the difference between men and women getting concussions and how do we respond? Why are the injury rates different? So we've really expanded from that platform two decades ago. So how many helmets now? What has this grown to? How many different types of helmets are you all currently rating? Well, we have 11 different sports that we're currently running. We have nine different rating programs that are up now. So we started in 2011 rating football helmets and that really revolutionized the football industry and pushed everybody to make better football helmets. We went from there to hockey. And now we're doing almost every helmeted sport. We've got programs in rugby, whitewater sports, ski sports, bicycling is the biggest market globally. So if you look at who visits our web page, it's bicycling is by far the dominant market. And we get about 5 ,000 individual hits to our website every single day from around the world. When we do a release, like when we released Equestrian, we had 250 ,000 hits in one day from people around the world because they want to know what helmet to buy, what's the best protection for myself, for my kids, and it's really easy. And the other thing is there's two pillars that we stand on. One is scientific, so we have all the rigor, the engineering, the science behind what we're doing. It's all peer -reviewed journal publications. But the second pillar is the independence. So we are independent from the any manufacturer and people really resonate with both of those because they're used to a company saying hey I got the best helmet or they pay a you know they pay a person in the NFL to hold up their helmet say this is the best someone ever. So people are used to that and they like the fact that we're not pushing any product. We don't care. We just are telling you which helmets are better than others. We tell you what they cost so you can decide on the best helmet for the best price. And now it's really every sport. All those sports, we have flag football, we're working on baseball, softball. We're working on almost every sport out there. So the idea is it's a one stop shop. You can come here and click on the Virginia Tech link and decide what helmet for whatever sport your kids play in.

Travis

What is it like for you as a researcher to know that on any given day 5 ,000 people may look and use some of the information that you've helped to produce?

Stefan

It's great. You know, it's what's really interesting is when we travel and we go somewhere and people will start talking about the Virginia Tech helmet ratings or you know, Dick's Sporting Goods for example, they just put up a poster in all 1 ,000 Dick's shops across the country with a link to the Virginia Tech helmet ratings in their stores. If you look at Trek Bicycle, they have these ratings in their stores. The companies are putting it on their products, on their websites. If you go to any of these, you go to any football company website, they're gonna say Virginia Tech on it. This is our Virginia Tech five -star helmet. Same thing with bicycling, with ski helmets, equestrian helmets. What we're focused on is really trying to reduce injury and helping people make informed decisions, just like when you go buy a car. No one's going to go out there and buy a two -star car. So that's the same philosophy that we have here, is we want to push all the companies to make five -star helmets in whatever sport it is.

Travis

That's awesome. So what all factors go into testing the helmet? And I'm also curious, how long does it take to generate a rating for them?

Stefan

It takes us about two years to generate from scratch a star rating program for whatever sport that is. And that's usually, we typically assign a PhD student, it typically ends up in a PhD dissertation. And it starts with field work. So hockey, for example, we rented out the ice rink in Roanoke and we took test dummies up there and we dropped head forms onto the ice, onto the boards, onto the glass, and we quantify what that pulse looks like for a hockey player. Then we bring it back to the lab and we build a machine for that sport. Then we buy all the helmets and that's no trivial task. If you're going to start from scratch or you're looking at hockey, there's 50 different helmets. You got to buy a bunch of different samples. We'll do thousands of tests. So it takes about two years before we can do the groundwork, the testing, and then we release the ratings. We also let the companies know along the way this is what we're doing because we want them to make better helmets.

Travis

You all do ratings for the Helmets and the general public can see these and do you do them? I know you do them with Virginia Tech. Do you do them for specific college teams or the NCAA? Are you connected with them at all?

Stefan

We do a lot of work with the NCAA. They've been one of our big sponsors over the years. The NCAA, DOD partnered. So you've got college athletes, you've got the military academies. So we've worked with them for about the past decade on helping players safety, informing the NCAA on what sensors are good to use. There's a lot of sensors out there now. So we provide the NCAA with the data on what sensors they should be using. We also provide guidance on game structure, practice structure. We provide a lot of data -driven insight into the two -a -day football practices. Should we do two -a -days? Should we do one practice? How long should preseason be? We typically have a lot more injuries in preseason, so we've been working with the NCAA for really the past 10 years to...How do we modify preseason to bring that injury rate down? And most recently with the shell covers. So if you go out to the Virginia Tech spring game, you won't really notice it, but all of our players have a special shell cover on the outside that we've done a great deal of testing on to show that that reduces injury for our players. What you'll notice in the spring game, because it's a smaller crowd, is it's very quiet. So this extra layer dampens all the impacts, makes it, it doesn't, it doesn't sound as loud, also lowers accelerations, and it's a really nice product that, again, from the stands, you won't even notice it, but if you get up close, you'll be able to see that there's an extra little layer of protection that our players are using.

Travis

Wow, and are those do those shell covers that they get used in games or is that something that maybe they will be used in the future you think?

Stefan

Virginia Tech was the first school in this past fall 2023 to actually use them in games. We had some players. The players can self select. So if they want to use it, we allow them to use that. And that's also an area that we've advised the NCAA on in terms of moving forward. I think you're going to have more and more players, especially linemen want to wear this extra layer padding and extra layer protection. That's really cool. Hey, so is our two a days better or worse? Well, it's interesting. So what had happened is, again, going back five, six, seven years ago, nobody was really doing two a days anymore. They would have a walkthrough and then a hitting practice. So what's important is that you quantify the contact time. It's not practice time because practice can be very different. You can do walk -throughs, you can do individual drills. It's really a practice with contact that we quantify now. And so we limit contact practices, not two days or one day. It's a matter of how much contact time you're gonna have. And that's really the important thing. And that goes for all levels. So we do that for the NCAA, but we've also done that for high school, for youth football. It's not how many hours you're practicing, it's how many hours you're hitting and you want to limit that, but you can still practice. You can still do lots of drills and passing drills and all those things. You just want to quantify the contact time. So your research probably won't limit any conditioning drills necessarily. Right. That's all fine. We're focused on reducing head impacts and Little changes, so I'll give you an example when we talk about youth football, little changes can make a dramatic difference. So we work with Pop Warner, we instrumented the little kids playing football, these were six, seven, eight years old, so very young kids that start to play. We video track, we put the same sensors on their helmets that we had for Virginia Tech players, and what we found is over the course of the season, 75 % of youth football head impacts are in practice. Almost all of the big impacts are only in practice when you line the kids straight up and you run them straight at each other. And that, in fact, never happens in the game. In the game, it's always diagonal. They're running to the outside and it's a diagonal hit. It's much less forceful to the head. So we worked with Pop Warner to limit practice contact time and we reduced head impacts by 50%. So the average kid was getting 300 head impacts and we boiled that down to 150. So huge change.

Travis

That is awesome. It's that it was, I bet it was that, that bowl in the ring game that back in the eighties and nineties was so popular, but not, I did not like it.

Stefan

Right. And the thing we were able to prove is that it's not, then we followed kids the next season. And so we had teams that adopted the pop Warner changes, reduced their head impacts by 50%. But then we could prove to them that the kids in the games were not getting any different exposure than the teams that didn't change their rules. Because that was the thing, oh, you're going to get these kids hurt in games because they're not ready for it. No change in the games. The game impact exposure is exactly the same. The levels were the same. So we proved, look, you can cut contact by half in practice. And when you think of going from 300 to 150, that's 150 hand impacts per kid with two million kids playing football, it's hundreds of millions of head impacts that you're getting out of the game. And we all agree that's a good thing.

Travis

Well, you mentioned that was a small change that led to a big impact. I'm curious, in your time doing this, what has been, you think, the biggest change that you've noticed?

Stefan

There's been a lot of changes. So right now, everybody talks about concussions, right? It's a daily thing. In 2003, nobody cared about concussions. Nobody was talking about concussions. This predates the NFL settlement. This predates all of that. So...we were really coming at it as a basic science. What's happening to the human brains? How do we protect the players better? And it wasn't until 2008, nine, 10 that people started caring about concussions. So to me, the biggest change is we really are paying attention to this. And we're paying attention to all sports. We talk about football because football is a great sport. It's fun to watch. But now we're in all sports and we're especially looking at women's sports. What's happening to the female brain women's soccer, in women's rugby, lacrosse. There's so many unanswered questions. That's really the focus of our research now is understanding these different sports and how the male brain gets injured compared to the female brain, how we recover differently, how we process our thoughts differently. That's really where the state of the art is right now.

Travis

It sounds like that you do enjoy football. You enjoy watching the game. I think that's fair to say. I'm curious how your research has impacted how you watch the game.

Stefan

Certainly I watched the game very differently, but I think everybody has. Again, in the past two decades, people are just very much more aware of brain injury and that's great. We all watch the game much more differently. I mean, the NFL game is so different. College is so different. You know, we have targeting. We didn't used to have targeting, right? So if you think the football game has really changed, but all the sports have changed. I mean, if you think we have concussion protocol, if you're watching the NBA game, some, we're all aware of this. Oh, he's in the concussion protocol. She's in concussion protocol. We look at our Virginia Tech teams at basketball. We've had players out with concussions. So it's just that the awareness has really changed. I think that's much better for player safety. We're much more cautious on return to play. We have much better tools on how to treat players, what sort of progress they need to make before they can go back in the game. And again, two decades ago, that was just not a thing. No one talked about it. No one dealt with it. You know, you went to the sideline, you shrugged your shoulders and you got back in. All sports, right? Not just football, all sports. Basketball, baseball. But now, we're much better positioned to understand that, okay, you need to sit out, you need to rest, you'd have a gradual recovery, return to play, and that's better for your players' safety and long -term health. Well, that's awesome. It sounds like we've had a cultural shift in this area and that you've played a role in helping make that happen. It's been great. I mean, I love telling the story. And Virginia Tech has really been at the forefront of almost all this concussion research. And I can't emphasize enough that it's a team. And if we didn't have sports medicine, if we didn't have the great coaches here, it wouldn't happen. They could just shut it off. And so it really takes engineering. It takes science, sports medicine. It takes everybody working together to make something like this happen.

Travis

And thanks to Stefan for sharing his journey and his work related to helmets and making sports safer for all of us. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt .edu. I'm Travis Williams and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.