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  • By now you've heard the familiar story.

  • Football has a concussion problem, the head as a weapon on every single play of every single game of every single practice.

  • Today's football helmets are effective at doing what they were invented to.

  • Dio prevent skull fractures and brain bleeds, but they don't do much to decrease the force placed on a player's brain in a collision.

  • Have you yourself ever had a concussion?

  • Yes, ma'am, multiple concussions.

  • There's some that are just a little stingers that you can feel a slight headache and then it goes away.

  • There's some that I've had that you don't recognize where you are, the product that we have now.

  • It's the same part of we've had for three entirety of our careers and childhood growing up.

  • So you know, there's not really much available in terms of the innovation for safety.

  • Really, there's not much you can be concerned about because of the fact that either you play or you don't play.

  • That's where vices comes in.

  • A startup that's turning helmet design on its head.

  • We've completely redesigned the helmet from scratch.

  • Linear forces are less likely to cause a concussion than rotational forces What we wanted to do is trying to dress rotational force and reduce the energy that came to the outside of the head.

  • Current helmets on the market have two layers.

  • Ah, hard outer shell and an inner liner of foam padding.

  • The Vices helmet has four layers.

  • The helmet works much like a car bumper, crumpling to absorb force before it can reach a player's brain.

  • We wanted to employ some of those principles that have been used in automotive safety, the idea of a crumples owner bumper helmet that yielded and therefore slowed impact forces before they reach the head and brain.

  • It's not a soft, as you might think, uh, because it has to withstand the impact forces that you see on the football field on Sunday.

  • Why columns and the columns air able to buckle when there's four supplied, but they can also move what we call on the directionally.

  • So if you get one of these side impacts or shearing type impacts, the columns can actually moved back and forth.

  • And so by doing that, they can absorb these rotational type forces that occur vices.

  • One half a million dollars is part of the NFL's Head Health Challenge with General Electric and under armor, and the company has a roster of current and former players supporting its efforts.

  • Why invest?

  • Why not just say, I'll wear the helmet?

  • You gotta put your money where your mouth is, right?

  • We're dealing with something right now that is threatening the future of our sport.

  • And the only way that we can attack that and solve the issue is by making innovative technology available for the athletes that are playing the game.

  • Vices is careful to say that no helmet, including its own, can prevent concussions.

  • In fact, experts don't fully understand if there's any way to prevent concussions, period.

  • The best treatment for concussion is prevention linemen and football who have sub concussive blows.

  • They get hit on every play.

  • Is it possible that their brains are being injured?

  • Not big injuries once, but multiple injuries.

  • Every play now will improve technology partially prevent.

  • One could only hope so, but that's necessary but not sufficient.

  • How do we know that your helmet will actually be effective?

  • Currently, helmets are assessed based on their ability to reduce impact forces.

  • Our job is to create a helmet that mitigates those impact forces more effectively than others.

  • How?

  • That translates to concussion risk.

  • We don't know Right now.

  • We can demonstrate improve that we can reduce impact forces.

  • We can do that better than any helmet on the market.

  • Yeah.

By now you've heard the familiar story.

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