On Track Off Road No. 195

MIPS & CREATION OF THE NEW CRASH HELMET
because I have a lot of hair’
but the pressure point you are
exposed to during an accident
is somewhere between 750 to
1000kg and try to move something
with that: it’s impossible.
So, it is simple…but that’s one
of the reasons we have been
able to scale. There is a very
long-driven thought process
on why it looks like it does.”
In 1995 MIPS was founded
as a project between von
Holst and Halldin and the first
patent was lodged in 1998.
“The language between us
just didn’t match,” smiles
von Holst. “MDs [Doctor of
Medicine] cannot do everything
and engineers neither;
it took six months before our
dialogue was on the same
page.” Von Holst’s research
at the time found there were
“22,000 head injuries annually
in Sweden because of falls,”
he says. “65-70% of those
involved rotation. The energy
is absorbed by the skull but
there is always a register for
brain tissue and just a little is
enough. Even now concussion
is still a mystery; we don’t
know what it is, and no MD or
expert can tell me more.”
“It sounded stupid but we
wanted to create the internal
helmet…and it might have
taken years,” von Holst added
before divulging studies of
protein impact and how urea
and the physiology of Great
White Sharks can hold even
more secrets for how brain
injury and malformations can
be treated in years to come.
“With the first tests in 1996
we saw that we could reduce
the moment of impact that
refers to rotational acceleration,”
says Halldin of the idea
behind BPS. “We played with
prototypes of oil, Teflon and
some micro-spheres that left
dust all over the lab when we
impacted them! We then made
a two-dimensional spherical
model and went step-by-step.
I got a small amount of university
funding at the time
and then bigger funding so
I could go to the UK and the
University of Birmingham
where I’d heard of a professor
[Nigel Mills] who knew how to
test helmets for oblique impacts.
That was in 2000 and
we spent half a year building
the test method together. We
made the first test with a real
MIPS helmet, one with a sliding
layer and got great results
so I wrote a scientific article
on it in 2001. We started the
company and went out trying
to sell the fantastic MIPS concept…but
it was not that easy
because it was too expensive
at that time.”
It is puzzling as to why von
Holst and Halldin’s knowledge
and theories were not noticed
or discovered sooner by the
motorcycle industry. “A lot of
the helmet industry has been
quite conservative and the test
standards themselves have
driven the design of helmets,”
Halldin references. “Such as
the protrusion test – when
a helmet is dropped onto a
fifteen-degree angle surface –
but it is just to see that there
is nothing on the helmet that
will ‘grab’ into the road. They
didn’t measure anything inside
the head but rather the
impact force on the plate. So,
while it has been understood
that rotation is something you
should avoid it hasn’t really
been tested as part of a standard
and put into helmet to
absorb it. Conservatism is one
reason, another is that it takes
time to change and to educate
people. Others will point to
the fact that the way to measure
rotational acceleration was
not really developed at that
time either…but now there are
more sophisticated systems
to measure acceleration and
rotational velocity.”
“We are seeing a shift of
mindset. People used to laugh
at rotation as a problem…but
now everybody is working on
it. We see with our clients that
people are more aware and
are educating themselves,”
asserts Senior Project Manager
Daniel Lanner, revealing
that while the MIPS story is
a success and is being used
by almost 80 different brands
and in nearly 450 helmets
across sports and industries,
the story wasn’t always so
streamlined. After the first