Intel And Riddel Team Up To Make Safer Football Helmets

For football players, the helmet is one way to make sure that they stay safe. But, even the most advanced helmet out there is still just a barrier, and there's always a chance that something could break through it. Football players are prone to suffering concussions during their career, if not more critical injuries, and companies are trying their best to figure out ways to make that happen less. Intel and Riddel, along with a plethora of Universities scattered across the United States, have been working on just that: safer football helmets.

Intel is utilizing their own supercomputers and workstations to simulate football hits from every imaginable angle, velocity, and other factors that would change the result of any particular hit. The simulations are meant to test the results of a collision in football, and how that hit affects the brain. The hope is that, when it's all said and done, Riddel, and other football equipment manufacturers, will be able to make safer helmets.

Riddel is using in-helmet technology to process and send the data to Intel's Xeon-based workstations, where the information is run through several times. The real-time data is used to show the differences between impacts, where they are struck, and how fast the collision occurred. They are judging which hits cause concussions, and which ones don't.

In the end, Intel wants to install these new helmets with Atom processors, which would be able to send data from any particular hit to workstations and servers. That data, if it were needed, would be used to help the doctors, and anyone else that needed to know, figure out what exactly was wrong with the player. Hopefully, this would mean that the doctor, especially in light of a serious injury, would be able to start aiding the player faster, and potentially save their life. No word on when something like this could be ready for prime time, but both Intel and Riddel seem to be making a hard push for it, so it could be sooner than we think.

[via CNET]