Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh believe they can make football a much safer game to play by equipping helmets with magnets.
The idea is that the magnets would cause the helmets to repel each other when football players collide, thus reducing the force of the collision, according to Science News. The proposed method comes at a time when almost 1.2 million people in the U.S. are playing football, which sees 100,000 concussions at all levels every year.
Judy Cameron, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, said the magnets have yet to be tested in helmets with real players.
"But a lot of thought has gone into it, and the data that was shown about the ability of the magnets to actually repel each other looked extremely promising," Cameron added.
Raymond Colello, neuroscientist and collaborator in the research, talked about the idea recently at this year's meeting of the Society of Neuroscience, saying that unlike current helmet technology, which cushions blows after they've happened, magnets would reduce the impact of collisions before they take place, Discovery News reported.
Colello tested his magnets by putting them in helmets and dropping them from different heights to measure the amount of force created from the impact. He also placed two magnets one-fourth of an inch away from each other with their same poles facing each other, which resulted in both magnets exerting close to 100 pounds of repulsive force.
"At 48 inches, if you dropped a standard helmet and it hit a stationary object, it would create 120 g's of force," Colello said. "With the magnets we drop that below 100 g's."
Colello plans to test customized arc-shaped magnets fitted inside helmets worn by crash dummies on a zip line, Science News reported.
The research team believes helmets equipped with these magnets will be able to reduce the risk of concussions in football by up to 80 percent.
