Originally Posted by
wphamilton
Yeah the long tail in the back of aero helmets would be problematic it they hit the ground. I was thinking more simply, of the regular bike helmets, with I believe a smaller cross section facing the wind. That could make them slightly more aerodynamic than motorcycle helmets, depending on how the vent shapes affect it.
When MIPS first came out I thought it was a very good idea, but without data proving that it helped prevent concussions the jury was still out on it. It's been a while, and there might be more information now, but I don't think anything very solid has been proven yet.
Thank you. You allude to a very good point, which is, the difficulty of actually carrying out a properly designed helmet safety study in humans. Ideally, we would prefer to see a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study, because they are generally the gold standard. But that is just never going to happen in any compassionate, sensible country. For some users, that would be like agreeing to enter a study where they could be randomized to no seatbelt or no air bag or no antibiotics for pneumonia. Some people just will not do that, understandably. I you are perfectly healthy and love your WaveCel or MIPS or SPIN, you are not going to take a chance on not having your helmet on in the event you crash in the name of science, regardless of how noble and selfless you may be. So, then, I suppose we would probably be stuck with a retrospective look at accident crashes. But how does that get done? I live in one of the most pro-cycling cities on the planet, but we certainly don't have any kind of registry of accidents and victims. There is no mandatory reporting. Does your city, state, province, or prefecture have such a registry?
I would think that mandatory accident reporting would be almost a requirement in order to collect enough decent data for a retrospective study to have any kind of power. Maybe that will happen in some progressive and thoughtful locality somewhere. Until then, we are stuck with just random reporting of random events. And that isn't getting us any closer to the truth.