Via reader Norm, I got this short clip to an advertisement for a new game called Knockerball.
As Norm said, it seems like fun. But one thing that struck me is that it seems like it will have the same concussion problems as any other contact sport, and perhaps more because the cocoon will prevent the bruises that arises from physical contact and thus may encourage people to collide with each other more. Indeed colliding seems to be the point of the pastime, as in amusement park bumper cars.
The now well-known problems of concussion in football is not just direct impacts to the head. Such things can cause skull fractures. The use of padded helmets has reduced that risk but concussion risks remain because they caused by sudden changes in the momentum of the head that causes the brain to get whiplashed within the skull and this can happen even with padded helmets.
The helmet industry itself is now in an arms race to create the most technologically robust helmet. But, as Kyle Lamson of helmet company Xenith told me this past winter: “A concussion can actually happen without actually hitting your head, and if you can get a concussion without hitting your head, then a helmet can’t possibly prevent every concussion that can actually happen.” Concussion is caused by rapid acceleration and deceleration of the brain, so a whiplash effect can cause a concussion even if the head itself isn’t struck. And while helmet companies do not explicitly market their products as anti-concussion (the FTC investigated Riddell for making such claims without compelling proof in 2014), it isn’t difficult to see that marketing of helmets that “reduce impact” and are “backed by extensive research” is sending a specific message to consumers: this helmet will protect you from concussions.
As far as I can tell from the video, on impact the people are getting jerked around quite violently, and the game actually encourages such collisions by making it appear that you are highly protected,.
So yes, this new pastime could be fun but I would be wary of doing it.
It looks like it would completely eliminate all concussions that aren’t whiplash related, making for a drastic redction even if the whiplash possibility still remains. But I’d expect that even that would be reduced, as the collisions are greatly slowed by that half meter of padding, effectively reducing the acceleration the head is subjected to by making all collisions take several times as long.
When it comes to concussions, nobody talks about the elephant in the room: the elephant in the room. The size of the players is the biggest factor in whether concussions occur. Nothing will change that fact that a hit from a 100kg player will cause more damage than an 80kg player, regardless of the game, the amount of padding or protective equipment.
left0ver1under:
Why yes, F = ma. Other things being equal, more mass entails more force is exerted.
So what? Your complaint is orthogonal to the issue at hand.
It’s pretty obvious from the physics that if the net acceleration can be diminished, the resultant force is perforce diminished, for a given mass.
(The issue at hand is not whether greater mass at a given acceleration is more forceful than a lesser mass, but whether the net force for a given mass at a given acceleration can be diminished sufficiently to avoid a particular type of injury to a particular biological component under particular circumstances by suitable protective gear. That it can be diminished to some degree is not in question)
@ 1 Holms
Indeed. Isn’t that the whole point of automotive airbags?
@ 3 John Morales
Given that F = ma, diminishing the “net force for a given mass at a given acceleration” is indeed in question by virtue of being of being a physical impossibility.
(Take that, Mr PedantryPants)
Silentbob:
FFS.
How do you imagine airbags work?
The comparison with airbags is a good one. As Holms says, there the head is brought to rest by a cushion that greatly increases the time taken to reduce the speed of the head from the speed of the car to zero. This reduces the acceleration of the head to a value that makes the force on it smaller than if the head were brought to rest by hitting the windshield when the impact time is tiny.
But in this ball, I do not see the head cushioned in that way. The head seems to be free to move and so when the ball undergoes a sudden change in velocity, the whiplash effect would seem to be considerable. This ball’s working seems more like a seat belt that reduces the acceleration of the body but leaves the head free to move. It is better than no seat belt at all, of course.
I’d really like to see a close up camera shot of the head taken inside the ball when a collision occurs.
In response to silentbob, there is no single force in a collision. We need to distinguish between the force on the car in a collision and the forces on various moving parts within it. For the car, in F=ma, the mass is that of the car and a is that of the car and there is little we can do about it. But we are trying to reduce the impact on the brain and other parts of the body that are not rigidly connected to the car, and the force on such parts is equal to the mass of that part times its particular acceleration. This is why airbags can reduce the force on the head and seat belts reduce the force on the body, while the force on the car remains large.
Looks like lawsuits and insurance claims waiting to happen.
@ 5 John Morales
FFS indeed.
You wrote, “at a given acceleration”. Does that give you a clue?
Silentbob, yeah. I was imprecise, and Mano put it much better.