海角破解版

Among the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to try to solve the crisis of concussions in football, one effort is inspired by a hand-sized ball of quills 鈥� the hedgehog.

The hedgehog falls on purpose a lot and rarely gets hurt. That鈥檚 because it escapes predators by curling into a tight ball and bouncing to the ground, protected by a pelt with about 7,000 flexible spines, or quills, arranged by nature to distribute the blows.

鈥淚t has 3.8 billion years of R&D behind it,鈥� explained Nathan Swift, a physicist and the COO of Hedgemon, a startup that鈥檚 been working for four years on a way to adapt nature鈥檚 work into a new design for a football helmet liner.

The company began with a class project in the University of Akron鈥檚 graduate degree program in biomimicry. The discipline studies the sustainable ways nature has tackled its own challenges and then emulates and adapts them for human use.

In this case, that use would be to cut down on concussions. An estimated 20 percent of athletes are diagnosed each season with concussions and many of those occur in football. So Hedgemon began studying ways it could work nature鈥檚 protection into helmets. 

When it came to biomimicry concepts, the hedgehog had competition, including woodpeckers and long-horn rams. Both are outfitted with special protections for the brain in head-on collisions. But Swift said in sports, the direct blows aren鈥檛 the only, or even most dangerous, blows.

鈥淢ost hits also have more of a rotational component,鈥� he explained. 鈥淎 glancing blow, especially in football where you鈥檙e hit from the side or some odd angle, causes your head to turn abruptly which causes your brain to twist and turn inside your skull.鈥� 

There鈥檚 nothing linear about a hedghog鈥檚 fall. Its quills bend through a fall, but it takes 200 times the pressure to break, explains Emily Kennedy, the CEO of Hedgemon, who holds a doctorate in biomimicry.

鈥淚t鈥檚 kind of two different things that are working that make the hedgehog quills so good at shock absorption,鈥� she noted. 鈥淭he first is each individual quill has this unique internal structure that makes it kind of springy. It will bend, but it won鈥檛 break. 鈥� And it鈥檚 also the way these are laid out.鈥�

Kennedy鈥檚 office at the University of Akron is filled with images of hedghogs, from calendars to stuffed animals to screen savers. But Doug Paige has the real thing visiting his office at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He adopted Toothpick after a second grade class discovered it wasn鈥檛 the ideal classroom pet. (It鈥檚 nocturnal, its quills are sharp, and it doesn鈥檛 like to be handled a lot.)

Toothpick the hedgehog munches on mealworms in Doug Paige鈥檚 office at the Cleveland Institute of Art. [M.L. Schultze]

Paige teaches industrial design, studied biomimicry, and is another member of the Hedgemon team.

His work has been focused largely on the Goldilocks question: Which material at which length, strength, breadth and internal structure is just right when it comes to finding a man-made equivalent for nature鈥檚 creation. A quill that鈥檚 too soft allows too much of the blow to get through, but Paige adds, 鈥淚f you鈥檙e too hard, it will break under impact. So you need the amount that gives you rigidity, but will still flex.鈥�

That means settling on the right polymer. But Paige says the work is more complicated than that. The hedgehog looks like a hodgepodge, its quills kind of randomly resting on and criss-crossing each other. But the team has also had to figure out the precise spacing, angle and yawl of the quills.

Hedgemon was one of six projects that got start-up funding from the University of Akron Research Foundation鈥檚 Spark Fund. A cabinet in the university鈥檚 drop-test lab holds dozens of mashed packets of quills that attest to past misses. 

Different incarnations of Hegemon鈥檚 quill packets. [M.L. Schultze]

But last fall, newer versions of the packets were ready for their first official test. Sixteen of the small clusters were set into a skull-shaped frame, then into a clear football helmet, and put through the crash test devised by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment. NOCSAE is pretty much the only standard for approving equipment use in the pros, colleges and high schools.

Kennedy said Hedgemon was encouraged by the results.

鈥淲e actually outperformed a lot of the state-of-the-art models, I mean depending on the impact velocity and the location,鈥� said Kennedy. 鈥淏ut to even be in the running with the first generation full-scale prototype was pretty exciting to us.鈥�

The prototype had its limits: among them, the polymer pods were created by 3-D printing, cheaper than injection molds but also less structurally sound. The next test, this summer, will use the injection-molded materials. The results of the first test also suggested other changes, including repositioning some of the packets within the shell and resetting the fit of the shell itself. 

If the testing goes well, Hedgemon hopes to have its helmet liner in production within two years, an overall investment of six years.

But it鈥檚 far from the only effort to solve the concussion problem. NFL owners are putting up $100 million for health and safety research, $60 million of that for helmets.

Among the other efforts is technology called MIPS, Multi-directional Impact Protection System, which uses a system of planes that move inside the helmet to try to mimic the brain鈥檚 own way of protecting itself.

All the technologies potentially have four big customers: Riddell, Schutt, Xenith and the newcomer, VICIS.

Hedgemon has had preliminary discussions with them all. But it has other goals, too. 

鈥淚t鈥檚 a platform technology,鈥� Kennedy said, equating the company鈥檚 shock absorption technology to what Gortex is to waterproofing. She listed potential uses ranging from car seats to athletic shoes to flooring in nursing homes.