Children's cycle helmet rating

The Road Safety Trust has allocated further funding, through its Large Grants Scheme, to extend HIPER to children’s bicycle helmets. Current helmet test standards, such as EN 1080 in Europe, test children’s helmets the same way as adult helmets, against the same pass thresholds. But children ride their bicycles differently, are injured differently, and have different mechanical physiology to adults, which suggests their injury tolerance is different too. A rating built on adult assumptions may not tell parents what they actually need to know.

The project answers three questions in sequence.

What injuries do children sustain when cycling, how do they happen, and to whom? We reviewed the clinical data on child cyclist head injuries, published in Demographic and causal patterns in child cyclist head Injuries: Informing helmet test methods.

What are the mechanics of head impacts in children? Using the findings above, we establish the mechanical conditions of real-world head impacts in child cyclists, including the speeds, locations, angles, and surfaces involved.

How does child brain tissue respond to cycling-representative traumatic forces, and how does its tolerance compare with adults’? We apply the Imperial College FE brain model, adapted to children’s brains, to develop injury risk functions that map impact mechanics to head injury risk. This has never been explored this thoroughly for children before, and both the learnings and the model have applications well beyond cycling.

Question three is the final piece needed for a scientifically rigorous children’s helmet rating, carrying the same potential real-world implications as the adult HIPER rating. The work is led by Dr Will Dawber and is an extension of the HIPER programme — it will feature on the HIPER website alongside the adult ratings.