-: Sports related concussions have been in the spotlight
ever since the discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
or CTE, which is a degenerative brain disease believed
to be caused by repetitive concussive
or subconcussive level impacts.
Today, we have evidence that nearly 90% of deceased
former football players had some form of CTE.
So to address this problem,
I'm working with the Obel Sports Technologies
to develop a novel football helmet
that will reduce the likelihood of concussion,
brain damage and ultimately CTE.
Now we view a football helmet as a multi-component system,
where each individual component,
as well as the overall system,
have multiple conflicting objectives.
Such as, to maximize the energy absorption,
while minimizing the weight.
We first tried to design our helmet,
following a much more traditional method of three phases.
Namely, the research and design phase,
the building phase and the testing and analysis phase.
And these three phases are repeated
until you arrive at a optimal solution.
However, we learned that you may be able to optimize
individual components but the engineering uncertainties
will prevent your system from truly being optimal.
Therefore, you cannot simply
add together optimal components and have a optimal result.
This traditional method
is also very time consuming and expensive.
For example, it took our team tens of thousands
of dollars and several years
to go through this cycle just one time.
So for my thesis, I'm developing a better framework
for multi-component systems design
that is less expensive, less time consuming
and can better manage the engineering uncertainties.
First, we established targets for the overall system.
A target for a football helmet may be to totally absorb
the impact energy, then we link the individual components
together using a common metric,
such as kinetic energy.
Then, we begin at the top and sequentially design
each individual components with respect to the other
components, as well as respect
to the overall system targets.
And we manage the engineering uncertainties
by including three common types of error in all
of our design calculations.
Now my framework is also modular, to allow us to quickly
update and reiterate until we arrive at a robust design.
Now you can think of a robust design as a ball on a plateau,
whereas an optimal design would be a ball on a peak.
If your problem were to shift at all, due to errors,
your optimal ball would fall off its peak quickly,
resulting in a loss of performance,
whereas that robust ball would remain on the plateau.
Therefore, we desire robust designs
because they allow our problem
to shift without a substantial loss in performance.
And when it's your brain on the line,
you need your helmet to perform.
Now our framework is also generic,
because football is not the only sport
with a concussion problem.
So we want to be able to update
and design helmets for other sports.
But ultimately, my goal is to allow other engineers
to adopt my framework
to save on time, money and errors also.
Thank you.