Time for smart helmets in the Super Bowl?

Current helmets are designed to prevent heavy blows penetrating the outer shell and causing skull fractures or other serious brain injuries, however they are less good at stopping the force of lower-level impacts from passing through to the brain and causing concussions. Helmet manufacturers are but working on new designs that incorporate the latest materials and sensing innovation in order to provide protection from both kinds of injuries.

In 2007 Riddell launch their Head Impact Telemetry System, a helmet outfitted with accelerometers to sense the severity of forces encountered by players while a collision. But, the company has teamed up with Intel to make HITS more useful. "We're taking the output of the HITS system and using it in a different way," says John Hengeveld, director of marketing for high-performance computing at Intel. His team have adapted software for the most part used to crash-test cars with a model of impacts on the football field, allowing them to simulate player collisions.

While the benefits to professional football players are obvious, Hengeveld hopes that a wider group could benefit. "I'm far more interested in the hundreds of thousands of kids playing football every weekend," he says. These high-school games are unlikely to have access to the computing might of the NFL, nevertheless Hengeveld suggests that coaches could upload data to a cloud computing service for analysis from the sidelines. "The cloud can provide real value in protecting kids' lives," he adds. "Parents will want this for their kids."