Randy Souders wrote:
>
> I am a quadriplegic. Each year hundreds of kids [now 43] end up like
> myself and actor Christopher Reeve as a result of sports related spinal cord injuries.
>
> Surely you brilliant designers and engineers could figure out a simple,
> cost effective way to quickly and securely attach a football helmet to a
> shoulder-pad harness-- allowing full freedom of movement,
> range-of-motion, etc.-- but preventing the most violent movements and
> compression injuries to the neck and spinal cord.
>
Snip
>
> I hope someone seriously persues this idea.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Randy Souders
> http://www.randysouders.com
Randy:
Lots and lots of work has be done with regard to the type of design you
are looking for. They most common areas where these efforts have taken
place are in the areas of football, automobile racing and motorcycle
racing.
The neck joint is really a bunch of joints with a considerable number of
degrees of freedom. Achieving the necessary flexibility while still
providing the required level of safety has proven to be a very great
challenge.
I currently know to much about the state of the art to be able to blue
sky a solution.
I would really like to give you a better prognosis, but this is as I see
it. You may do better at giving this challange to a Ergonomics
listserver or to some biomedical engineering students at a university.
With said I will post it to my forum on compuserve, the Ideas,
Invention and Innovation Forum and will respond with what ideas the
inventors there come up with.
Niel Leon - CDS,inc
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:47:04 EEST