Use of headgear in football - A computer simulation of the human head and neck

Although head injuries in football having approximately the same incidence as in American football and ice hockey, head protectors are barely used for prophylaxis. A detailed human head-neck model including force elements describing the material behaviour of human soft tissue structures such as ligaments, tendons, cartilage layers, intervertebral discs and muscles has been developed using multi-body system (MBS) modelling techniques to investigate the effectiveness of commercial headgear. For ball-head impacts at ball velocity of about v = 20 m/s the simulations calculate a Head Impact Power (HIP) index of 4.1 kW resulting in a five percent injury risk for concussion. When using headgear the resulting HIP-value comes to 3.91 kW meaning that the reduction of the injury risk is very small.