Head and neck injury potential during water sports falls: examining the effects of helmets

Head and neck injuries sustained during water skiing and wakeboarding occur as a result of falls in water and collisions with obstacles, equipment, or people. Though water sports helmets are designed to reduce injury likelihood from head impacts with hard objects, some believe that helmets increase head and neck injury rates for falls into water (with no impact to a solid object). The effect of water sports helmets on head kinematics and neck loads during simulated falls into water was evaluated using a custom-made pendulum system with a Hybrid-III anthropometric testing device. Two water entry configurations were evaluated: head-first and pelvis-first water impacts with a water entry speed of 8.8 ± 0.1 m/s. Head and neck injury metrics were compared to injury assessment reference values and the likelihoods of brain injury were determined from head kinematics. Water sport helmets did not increase the likelihood of mild traumatic brain injury compared to a non-helmeted condition for both water entry configurations. Though helmets did increase injury metrics (such as head acceleration, HIC, and cervical spine compression) in some test configurations, the metrics remained below injury assessment reference values and the likelihoods of injury remained below 1%. Using the effective drag coefficients, the lowest water impact speed needed to produce cervical spine injury was estimated to be 15 m/s. The testing does not support the supposition that water sports helmets increase the likelihood of head or neck injury in a typical fall into water during water sports.