Team
THE DEVELOPERS
During the development of the VALENS Head Guard System®, various specialists from the disciplines of medicine, technology and design were optimally combined in order to develop effective and elegant protection to prevent serious head injuries.
The continuous cooperation with the Austria-based production partner Kobleder GmbH, one of the world’s leading specialists in manufacturing of technical knitted fabrics, guarantees the highest quality standards and constant further development of the VALENS product range.
Dr. med. univ. Philipp Lanz, Development team leader on the high risk of suffering a serious head injury.
With an incidence of 300/100,000/year and a lethality of 11/100,000/year inhabitants, craniocerebral trauma is a relevant, potentially preventable cause of death in Austria (Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift). For most people this is a statistic, for me as a trauma surgeon it is a sad daily reality. About one in three acute admissions to trauma surgery departments involves traumatic brain injury. The traumata range from simple concussions to severe cranial bleeding with a fatal outcome.
The physicist DI Matthias Piffl about the challenge of taming negatively accelerating forces.
A knitted hat that can save lives? That was the Idea of Dr. Lanz when he showed me a knitting pattern on a box. As a physicist, it was immediately clear to me that high G-forces occur when two hard objects collide (head on the ground). These can only be reduced by a correctly dimensioned crumple zone (cushioning). What Dr. Lanz still lacked was a way to determine the knitting pattern that would have the best protective (cushioning) properties. Because even if the head falls from a height of 37.5 cm, 270g act on it when touching a hard surface. This corresponds to 70 times what a Formula 1 driver has to endure in a corner.
