Head impact in a snowboarding accident

Abstract

To effectively prevent sport traumatic brain injury (TBI), means of protection need to be designed and tested in relation to the reality of head impact. This study quantifies head impacts during a typical snowboarding accident to evaluate helmet standards. A snowboarder numerical model was proposed, validated against experimental data, and used to quantify the influence of accident conditions (speed, snow stiffness, morphology, and position) on head impacts (locations, velocities, and accelerations) and injury risk during snowboarding backward falls. Three hundred twenty-four scenarios were simulated: 70% presented a high risk of mild TBI (head peak acceleration >80 g) and 15% presented a high risk of severe TBI (head injury criterion >1000). Snow stiffness, speed, and snowboarder morphology were the main factors influencing head impact metrics. Mean normal head impact speed (28 ± 6 km/h) was higher than equivalent impact speed used in American standard helmet test (ASTM F2040), and mean tangential impact speed, not included in standard tests, was 13.8 (±7 km/h). In 97% of simulated impacts, the peak head acceleration was below 300 g, which is the pass/fail criteria used in standard tests. Results suggest that initial speed, impacted surface, and pass/fail criteria used in helmet standard performance tests do not fully reflect magnitude and variability of snowboarding backward-fall impacts.

Spinal injury analysis for typical snowboarding backward falls

“…The snowboard, boots and bindings were extracted from a previous snowboarder model and were adapted to current mid‐size HFM (Figure D,E). The model was slightly inclined forward, representing a typical snowboard posture.…”

“…Contacts were defined among the body parts, snowboard, and the snow. In particular, the contact characteristics between the body and the snow were obtained by numerically reproducing experimental head‐form drop tests on soft and hard snow …”

“…As the only experimental attempts to simulate snowboarding falls, these two works did not report data about spinal loadings and were limited to their designed conditions. Bailly et al made the first attempt to evaluate the effects of initial conditions (eg, velocity, slope angle, and snowboarder size) on head injuries with a multi‐body human model. However, due to spinal modeling simplifications, investigations of injury risk at detailed spinal segment level would require significant improvements in the model definition.…”

Recorded Speed on Alpine Slopes: How to Interpret Skier’s Perception of Their Speed?

“…Each year approximately 150,000 ski and snowboard-related injuries are treated in a French medical centers [1]. One of the main factors affecting the kinematic of the accident and the injury severity is the speed of the participant prior to the accident [2,3]. Indeed, the energy involved in the accident and the kinematic of the fall are related to the speed of the participant before the accident.…”

Head and neck injury potential during water sports falls: examining the effects of helmets

“…Test trials were conducted without a helmet and with the three helmet models. Based on the injury mechanisms described in the previous papers [2,8], a review of injury data from the United States Consumer Products Safety Commission (used in [4,5]), and the kinematics of edge catches from similar activities (snowboarding in [14]), a Head-First impact scenario was tested for each helmet condition. The Head-First impact configuration simulated a scenario in which a water skier or wakeboarder gets turned backward relative to the direction of travel and falls backward into the water with the superior, occipital region of the head leading; see Fig.…”