From stadiums to jobsites: Virginia Tech lab plans to rate safety helmets

Blacksburg, VA — The Virginia Tech Helmet Lab is planning to venture outside of sports and recreation to create ratings for safety helmets.

Researchers from the lab, which introduced the first football helmet ratings system 13 years ago, will soon launch an 18-month study intended to help establish the first ratings system for safety helmets.

The new system will follow the lab’s five-star scale that researchers currently use for helmets in nine different sports.

The lab says it will study head impact and concussion risk in a worksite environment to characterize conditions associated with these injuries in construction via incident report analysis and surveillance video. It also will conduct tests on commercially available safety helmets.

The ratings data will be available on the lab’s website when the study is complete.

Steve Rowson, director of the Helmet Lab, said the number of workplace deaths in construction, which Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows reached 1,008 in 2020, prompted his team to turn its focus to safety helmets.

“Of all industries, construction has the most fatalities,” Rowson said in a press release. “Identifying, improving and implementing better head protection could be the difference between life and death.”