Hockey helmet ratings from Virginia Tech's STAR system show change may be needed

Concussions have become a huge issue throughout sports in the last few years, and they're getting even more attention in hockey recently thanks to growing litigation against the NHL, statistics about concussions in NCAA hockey, and the recent death of Steve Montador. Now, researchers from Virginia Tech's biomedical engineering department (which has been rating football helmets for safety since 2011) have released their results from testing a variety of hockey helmets, and the results aren't good. Of the 32 helmets tested, none acheived a five-star or four-star rating. Only one, the Warrior Krown 360, achieved a three-star "good" rating. Six received a two-star "adequate" rating, 16 received a one-star "marginal" rating, and the remaining nine received a zero-star "not recommended" rating. These ratings aren't the be-all and end-all of helmet evaluation or concussion prevention, but they've proven to be a valuable data point in football. Having their hockey ratings so low across the board suggests there may be fundamental problems with how hockey helmets are designed.

How are these ratings arrived at? Well, they're from a complicated series of tests, which for hockey are described in a paper researchers Bethany Rowson, Steven Rowson and Stefan Duma (the head of Virginia Tech's department of biomedical engineering, who's led the way on the football helmet tests) published in the Annals of Biomedial Engineering journal Monday. What's particularly notable is that the hockey model, accounts for both linear and rotational acceleration from hits; the football model only initially accounted for linear acceleration, which was a key criticism levied at it by some. Each model is tested 48 times, using four different impact locations (four, front, side, top and back) and three different energy levels; each combination of impact location and energy level is repeated four times on two different helmets of the same model. That's a rigourous approach, and one that should be fair to the helmets tested. Helmet manufacturers will undoubtedly have some issues with this, as we've seen in pushback against the football studies, and cite other studies that are more favourable to them, but what's really remarkable here is that this isn't particularly favouring some hockey helmets over others. Instead, it's writing the current models off as three stars at best, which suggests there may be more deeply-pronounced design flaws in current hockey helmets.

What would researchers recommend instead? Well, there's an interesting note on that in this CBC article:

While we have a sense of "what a hockey helmet should look like" from decades of watching them, the current helmets aren't necessarily designed from first principles or designed to maximize protection against concussive and subconcussive (which can be even a bigger problem in the long run; the STAR model considers these too) hits. A more football-style helmet would certainly look different than the hockey ones we're used to, and there might be some practical challenges with translating it to a different sport. However, going closer to the football model might well be worth considering for hockey helmet manufacturers. These STAR ratings aren't the only factor people should consider when buying helmets, and doing well in them isn't the only thing that should go into hockey helmet design, but these ratings being so low across the board suggests current hockey helmets aren't doing an optimal job of preventing potentially-concussion-causing acceleration. That should be examined.