Impact monitoring system for helmets debuted
A Lebanon-based company has been acquired by Riddell, well-known maker of football helmets and accessories, as part of its continuing efforts to make the sport safer.
Greg Lange, CEO at Simbex, a sports and medical device and consumer health product design and development company in Lebanon, said the acquisition of the company by Riddell cements a longstanding partnership.
“With Riddell, it’s been nice to appreciate the value we both bring to what we’re doing, not just today but in the long term,” he said. “Having a large team of incredibly capable engineers allows us to look at new technologies, to think about what we can implement down the road. We’re both thinking about not what we’re doing today, but how we improve our products and technology in the long run.”
“Simbex is very good at the appropriate sensors, building the electronics, figuring out how to interpret the data — that’s algorithm development — communications through apps, so that we can collect the data, view the data, pull it into the cloud and give data analytics,” added Lange. “It requires fairly sophisticated engineering to be able to figure out that whole process.”
Riddell is a well-known designer and developer of football helmets, protective sports equipment, apparel and related accessories.
Simbex had partnered with Riddell in the most current development and deployment of Riddell’s InSite impact response system and the InSite Analytics platform, a suite of technology that is part of Riddell’s Axiom smart helmet product.
InSite is a wearable, helmet-based impact monitoring system designed to alert when significant single and multiple impacts are sustained during a football game or practice.
The analytics platform provides automated reports and compares teams’ head-impact data to national norms (playing level/position-specific) and individual history. A weighted metric takes medium- and high-intensity head impacts into consideration and compares them to national norms and personal player histories.
“The acquisition by Riddell will strengthen our ability to deliver transformative technology while upholding our core values as a premier consulting firm,” Lange said with the acquisition announcement in April. “This partnership underscores our mutual dedication to advancing health, protection and performance through cutting-edge product design, development and commercialization strategy.”
Thad Ide, Riddell’s executive vice president of research and product development, added: “This acquisition cements an already strong partnership and underscores our commitment to leveraging Simbex’s broad capabilities and expertise in pursuit of next-generation head protection platforms.”
Simbex technology products
Simbex was founded in early 2000 by biomedical engineer Rick Greenwald and entrepreneur Robert C. Dean.
An adjunct professor at Dartmouth College, Greenwald’s research over the years has involved biomechanics, injury prevention, sports equipment, product development and technology commercialization.
He created Simbex to bring some of the research-based ideas to market in the form of new technology and its own products.
Football helmet technology developed by Simbex in Lebanon includes software that provides automated reports and compares teams’ head impact data to national norms (playing level/position-specific) and individual history. Simbex has been acquired by helmet manufacturer Riddell. (Courtesy photo)
“Over time, we shifted to developing products for others, and that’s really been the world we’ve been in for 10 to 15 years, engineering, consulting, commercialization strategy around medical devices, health tech, sports tech,” said Lange, who came on board at Simbex in 2017 as its chief operating officer/chief business development officer, now its CEO since January 2023.
Most of the ideas that Simbex works on come from a researcher or clinician who wants to fully develop an idea they have, say, sketched out on a napkin.
Some of those ideas include a voice health monitoring system for InnoVoyce and Massachusetts General Hospital.
“If you’re a speech pathologist, and you’re seeing someone that maybe spends a lot of time on stage performing, and they’re worried about their voice and they’re having some voice challenges, how do you track that over time? So we built a product for a company called InnoVoyce to do the work on voice health monitoring,” said Lange.
Another product — a wearable watch-type alert device for seniors — was developed for Silvertree, which is marketing the product in partnership with Martha Stewart. “We helped them create a fall-detection algorithm,” said Lange.
That type of development for others will continue with the Riddell acquisition.
Riddell has been actively interested in Simbex’s work in head-impact sensors since the early 2000s.
“Around 2003-2004, we actually acquired the rights to the technology. At the time, it was called the Head Impact Telemetry System or HITS, but we branded it the Riddell Sideline Response System,” said Erin Griffin, senior vice president of marketing and communication at Riddell.
“I think the notable element of this product was that it was a helmet-based system designed to measure impact to the head, not to the helmet,” Griffin added. “It was integrated into the helmet versus some other devices that have been developed over time that are affixed to the outside of the helmet. We feel what Rick and team felt was right was their secret sauce was the integrated nature of the sensing system.”
Riddell manufactures the Axiom, which comes standard with the InSite smart helmet technology developed by Simbex.
Impact data
Sports-related head injuries, particularly from football, have been the subject of extensive research and concern.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), studies have shown a direct link between blows to the head during contact sports (football, boxing and soccer, for instance) and traumatic brain injury. The condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) can lead to depression, suicide, loss of judgment, inability to control impulse, rages and memory loss, and can ultimately result in dementia.
The deaths of a long list of professional football players have been attributed to CTE, among them, Junior Seau, Hall of Fame linebacker who played for the New England Patriots. He committed suicide in 2012. An autopsy confirmed a diagnosis of CTE.
Several years ago, a few NFL teams experimented with smart helmet technology but dropped the program after a couple of seasons over concerns about accuracy of the data and player privacy. For the upcoming season, the NFL is allowing the use of so-called Guardian Caps during games. The padded headgear was required for players at certain positions during 2022 and 2023 training camps. The NFL said data show the Guardian Caps contributed to a nearly 50% reduction in concussions.
There’s a high rate of concern locally about youth football and head injury, according to a recent study by the Zinda Law Group, a national personal injury law group.
According to the study, the participation rate of boys in high school football in the Granite State is 14.8%. That’s about 31% lower than the national average, according to the study. It said the state also sees an average monthly volume for head injury-related searches on Google of 176.2 per 100,000 people, or 2,470 total searches every month. That is the fifth highest state for that kind of head-injury related searches, said the law group.
Improving athlete protection
Included in Riddell’s mission is advancing and improving athlete protection. There’s a performance component, as well, associated with the helmet technology.
“We also believe that these technologies present a performance benefit beyond the protection benefit,” said Griffin, noting that data collected by the analytics platform can give coaches feedback on player performance. “We also believe that these technologies present a performance benefit beyond the production benefit,” she added.
Simbex’s continuing research and development will help Riddell continue to create innovative football helmets.
“We continue to innovate and look for new ways to advance the protective capabilities of the helmet — new materials, new form factors, other ways to dissipate energy are all the things that the team is working tirelessly on every day,” said Griffin. “Even when you launch a new helmet, the next day they turn the page to: what’s the next thing we’re working on?”
Simbex employs about 35 people at its Lebanon location, engineers mostly with advanced degrees, and specialists in mechanical and electrical components, firmware and data mining.
Griffin expects “little to no change” at Simbex as a result of the acquisition.
“We’ve always considered the Simbex team an extension of our team,” she said. “I think this just solidifies it and, frankly, helps us work even more closely together on the projects that we already are working on right and presents new opportunities around continued expansion and acceleration of the projects, namely InSite Analytics.”
For Simbex, the opportunities remain for the company to do what it does best for Riddell and others, according to Lange.
“There’s so much more we can do, and we’re just seeing the beginning of a new step in ways that we can leverage technology to make it easier to get that data and implement that work,” he said.
InSite is designed to alert when impacts are sustained during a football game or practice.
