A Review of Cyclist Head Injury, Impact Characteristics and the Implications for Helmet Assessment Methods

Claire Baker, Xiancheng Yu, Saian Patel, Mazdak Ghajari

Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 2023

Abstract

Head injuries are common for cyclists involved in collisions. Such collision scenarios result in a range of injuries, with different head impact speeds, angles, locations, or surfaces. A clear understanding of these collision characteristics is vital to design high fidelity test methods for evaluating the performance of helmets. We review literature detailing real-world cyclist collision scenarios and report on these key characteristics. Our review shows that helmeted cyclists have a considerable reduction in skull fracture and focal brain pathologies compared to non-helmeted cyclists, as well as a reduction in all brain pathologies. The considerable reduction in focal head pathologies is likely to be due to helmet standards mandating thresholds of linear acceleration. The less considerable reduction in diffuse brain injuries is likely to be due to the lack of monitoring head rotation in test methods. We performed a novel meta-analysis of the location of 1809 head impacts from ten studies. Most studies showed that the side and front regions are frequently impacted, with one large, contemporary study highlighting a high proportion of occipital impacts. Helmets frequently had impact…

Cite as (BibTeX)

@article{baker-2023-a-review-of-cyclist,
  title={A Review of Cyclist Head Injury, Impact Characteristics and the Implications for Helmet Assessment Methods},
  author={Claire Baker and Xiancheng Yu and Saian Patel and Mazdak Ghajari},
  journal={Annals of Biomedical Engineering},
  year={2023},
  doi={10.1007/s10439-023-03148-7}
}