Montreal-based consortium is one of three winners of the NFL helmet safety challenge

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A Montreal-based consortium is one of three winners of the National Football League’s NFL Helmet Challenge, a competition in which companies were invited in 2019 to submit a prototype for a safer helmet, one that would exceed standards. of the helmets now worn by NFL players. to protect them from concussion.

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Hit It is the only company not based in the United States, and it also won the largest grant of the three to continue its research: $ 550,000.

“We were competing against teams that are helmet manufacturers,” Franck Le Navéaux, research coordinator for Kollide’s NFL Helmet Challenge project, said Monday.

“It is very exciting and we are very proud.”

Kollide was one of four successful applicants out of more than 100 for an initial NFL grant for research and development. In the end, 13 companies submitted a prototype, including Kollide, and the NFL announced the three winners on Monday .

The consortium is made up of four startups. Each has an experience in a different niche and they all worked together in what Le Navéaux described as “an engineering competition to stimulate innovation.”

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Tactix is an industrial design company with experience in developing sports equipment and other performance equipment, but not helmets. Kupol specializes in 3D printing; The helmet liner developed by Kollide is made from a 3D-printed mesh structure consisting of 95 pads, each with a mesh interior, each optimized to absorb and redirect impact energy, he explained.

Numalogics specializes in virtual testing. “They can test the helmet without producing a prototype,” explained Le Navéaux, Numalogics director of scientific research. “They can digitally design and optimize the structure by testing thousands of configurations and choosing the best one … I think the digital tools we created played an important role in our ability to prototype.”

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3D shape shift specializes in custom products such as knee braces, using software that adapts medical, protective or sports products to the 3D scanned measurements of an individual.

“Since the liner is 3D printed, we can have a different liner for each player,” explained Le Navéaux. “By taking a 3D scan of the player’s head, we can tailor the liner so that the helmet fits perfectly.”

A mechanical engineer by profession, he has been working in the field of medical devices, primarily with spinal implants, and Kollide’s approach was to consider the helmet as a medical device, he said.

The 12 who worked on the project arrived as strangers. “What brought us together is the challenge,” said Le Navéaux. “We were all sensitive to cushioning issues in sport and we knew that by combining our strengths we could create something great.”

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None were a football fan and none had ever designed a football helmet, so they approached the project “with a fresh mind,” he said. They worked full-time for a year and a half on the project, mostly online due to the coronavirus pandemic, and their companies invested resources and knowledge. Also part of his team were two researchers from the École de technologie supérieure who were in charge of the experimental tests.

The Kollide team designed several prototypes, modifying them along the way. “We used both virtual testing and sometimes we were going to run tests in the real world to make sure we were on the right track,” Le Navéaux said. They worked with Martin Bédard, a player for the Canadian Football League, to ensure that his helmet met the needs of a professional player in areas such as hearing, comfort, field of vision and aesthetics.

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With the grant money announced Monday, the Kollide team will continue its research and development, Le Navéaux said. “Now we have a prototype. In a year we will have a product ”.

And the technology they have developed can be adapted for other sports, he said, including hockey and bicycle helmets, boxing gloves and shin guards.

In a statement Monday, the NFL said the Helmet Challenge submissions had achieved an improvement of up to 13 percent over the high-performance helmet currently used in the League.

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