This genius helmet sticker helps protect athletes’ brains |
This genius helmet sticker helps protect athletes’ brains
The Crash Patch sticker turns red when an athlete takes a severe impact.
[Photo: Klick Health]
In late February, 32 of the world’s best snowboarders gathered at Buttermilk Ski Resort—a so-called “mountain playground” in Aspen, Colorado—to go head-to-head in a high-stakes halfpipe competition. While most spectators were focused on their physical skills, eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed that three of the athletes were wearing identical stickers on their helmets. These stickers weren’t just ornamental: contained inside the small patches is a prospective technology that could have ripple effects across the broader sports world.
The snowboarders (most of which arrived fresh off the Olympics) were competing in an event hosted by The Snow League, the first professional winter sports league dedicated to snowboarding and freeskiing. Founded by five-time Olympian Shaun White in 2024, this new league gives athletes access to a year-round, global competition where they can display their skills. On February 27 and 28, it also served as a testing ground for a new technology called the Crash Patch.
Developed by the health company Klick Health in collaboration with The Snow League, the Crash Patch is a first-of-its-kind helmet sticker that’s designed to alert athletes if they’ve taken a major blow to the head. Previously, this kind of shock-detection capability has mainly been incorporated directly into high-tech helmet designs for football teams, making them expensive and difficult to access for most athletes.
This sticker concept—which is not yet commercially available—could eventually make head impact detection accessible and intuitive for athletes in any helmet-based sport, at any level.
A design for an ‘urgent need’
The concept for the Crash Patch started with Kate Maldjian, an associate creative director at Klick Health who skateboards in her free time. “When I’m skateboarding, I fall all the time,” Maldjian says. “I’m wearing a helmet, but sometimes I don’t know how heavy the impact is.”
That’s a common issue for many athletes: Neurologists say that an impact to the head at 75 times the force of gravity, or 75G, is a high-risk threshold that may result in a concussion. Many athletes can sustain such a blow without realizing its severity, or experience delayed symptoms that don’t emerge until hours later. Maldjian and her colleague, fellow Klick Health associate creative director Dan Macena, came up with a design-focused solution to this problem.
Devices that measure sports-based blunt force trauma to the head aren’t new. Scientists have been working on similar projects for more than a decade, including multiple companies that have created shock-detecting helmets for football players.
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