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BLACKSBURG, Va. (WDJ) – According to the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab, impacts to the head kill about 50 whitewater rafters a year.
“We’ve tested all 24 helmets on the market right now and half of them are great and half of them are not so great,” said Virginia Tech engineering professor Stefan Duma.
He and his team of researchers gave each helmet a star rating of one to five, with five being rated as the safest.
“The price we got is not related to performance,” Duma said. Some of the cheapest helmets work really well, some of the more expensive helmets don’t work well at all.
The difference between Duma’s five-star rating and one-star rating is 50% less chance of head injury.
“We put the helmets on the dummy’s head and impact them in different directions and at different speeds in the dummy’s head,” Duma said. “We’re measuring speeds, so we measure linear and rotational speed. We multiply that by your shock risk and we multiply that by the event and add all that data together for one value.
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