[House Hearing, 115 Congress] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] HEAD HEALTH CHALLENGE: PREVENTING HEAD TRAUMA FROM FOOTBALL FIELD TO SHOP FLOOR TO BATTLEFIELD ======================================================================= HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION __________ DECEMBER 13, 2017 __________ Serial No. 115-42 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov _________ U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE 28-412 PDF WASHINGTON : 2018 COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas DANA ROHRABACHER, California ZOE LOFGREN, California MO BROOKS, Alabama DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon BILL POSEY, Florida AMI BERA, California THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma MARC A. VEASEY, Texas RANDY K. WEBER, Texas DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia STEPHEN KNIGHT, California JACKY ROSEN, Nevada BRIAN BABIN, Texas JERRY McNERNEY, California BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia PAUL TONKO, New York RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana BILL FOSTER, Illinois DRAIN LaHOOD, Illinois MARK TAKANO, California DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii JIM BANKS, Indiana CHARLIE CRIST, Florida ANDY BIGGS, Arizona ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas NEAL P. DUNN, Florida CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina ------ Subcommittee on Research and Technology HON. BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia, Chair FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut STEPHEN KNIGHT, California JACKY ROSEN, Nevada DARIN LaHOOD, Illinois SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana AMI BERA, California DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia JIM BANKS, Indiana EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas ROGER W. MARSHALL, Kansas LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas C O N T E N T S December 13, 2017 Page Witness List..................................................... 2 Hearing Charter.................................................. 3 Opening Statements Statement by Representative Lamar S. Smith, Chairman, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives................................................ 4 Written Statement............................................ 6 Statement by Representative Daniel Lipinski, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 8 Written Statement............................................ 10 Statement by Representative Barbara Comstock, Chairwoman, Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 12 Written Statement............................................ 14 Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives 16 Written Statement............................................ 17 Witnesses: Dr. Michael Fasolka, Acting Director, Material Measurement Lab, NIST Oral Statement............................................... 20 Written Statement............................................ 22 Mr. Scott A. Kebschull, Vice President and Technical Director, Dynamic Research, Inc. Oral Statement............................................... 31 Written Statement............................................ 33 Dr. Alex O. Dehgan, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Conservation X Labs Oral Statement............................................... 39 Written Statement............................................ 41 Mr. Shawn Springs, Chief Executive Officer, Windpact Oral Statement............................................... 55 Written Statement............................................ 57 Robert Daniel Reisinger, Director of Engineering, 6D Helmets, LLC. Written Statement............................................ 62 Discussion....................................................... 69 Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions Dr. Michael Fasolka, Acting Director, Material Measurement Lab, NIST........................................................... 82 Mr. Scott A. Kebschull, Vice President and Technical Director, Dynamic Research, Inc.......................................... 87 Dr. Alex O. Dehgan, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Conservation X Labs............................................ 88 Mr. Shawn Springs, Chief Executive Officer, Windpact............. 96 HEAD HEALTH CHALLENGE: PREVENTING HEAD TRAUMA FROM FOOTBALL FIELD TO SHOP FLOOR TO BATTLEFIELD ---------- Wednesday, December 13, 2017 House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Research and Technology Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Washington, D.C. The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:07 a.m., in Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Barbara Comstock [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding. [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will come to order. Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare recesses of the Committee at any time. Good morning, and welcome to today's hearing entitled ``Head Health Challenge: Preventing Head Trauma from Football Field to Shop Floor to Battlefield.'' I now recognize Chairman Smith, who has another hearing right now, to give his statement first as he has another obligation in Judiciary Committee that he needs to get to. Chairman Smith. Chairman Smith. Yes, I appreciate your recognizing me out of order. I do have to shuttle between hearings, so that will be helpful. And thank you to Chairwoman Comstock for holding today's hearing. The Science Committee has a longstanding, bipartisan interest in the use of science prizes and challenge competitions to address difficult national problems. The American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, signed into law in January of this year, included provisions from our Committee that streamlined and improved how federal agencies participate in science prize competitions. Our Committee is particularly supportive of the Head Health Challenge due to the involvement of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, over which this Committee has jurisdiction. NIST has been a leader among federal science agencies in challenge prizes and science competitions, including private-public and multi-agency initiatives. Science prizes aren't new. At a Science Committee hearing last Congress, curators from the Smithsonian brought the original $25,000 prize check earned by Charles Lindbergh for his solo, nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. At the time, Lindbergh's daring feat and the $25,000 prize attracted a lot of attention. But few people understood what we know today, that Lindbergh's achievement launched the age of aviation and the aerospace industry. Scientific prizes and challenges are proven approaches for spurring innovation and solving problems. As we will hear this morning, collaboration between the federal government and the private sector adds credibility and is often the best way to trigger breakthroughs. Our witnesses will tell us about the final phase of the Head Health Challenge, a challenge prize sponsored by NIST, the National Football League, Under Armour, and General Electric. The objective of this challenge is to accelerate the design and development of advanced materials for helmets, pads and other products that protect against head injuries. Better design and materials for helmets and other protective gear can reduce head injury risk in many occupations. These include all sports and at all levels of competition, head--high-risk jobs like construction, manufacturing, and forestry, first responders, frail elderly individuals and, importantly, our American soldiers. DOD estimates that 22 percent of combat casualties from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan involved brain injuries, compared to 12 percent of Vietnam-related combat casualties. Improved helmet protection is one of the best steps we can take as a nation to improve the quality of life for our military veterans. Preventing or minimizing head injuries is also an important public health and safety issue for children on bicycles, for amateur and professional athletes, for fire and police personnel, and for men and women of all ages and all walks of life. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about the success of the Head Health Challenge and yield back. [The prepared statement of Chairman Smith follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I now recognize Mr. Lipinski for five minutes. Mr. Lipinski. Thank you, Chairwoman Comstock, for holding this hearing, and thank you to our witnesses for being here today. Prizes and other types of challenges have proven to be valuable tools to advance research and technological innovation to help solve some of today's biggest social and economic problems, including head injuries. Under the Obama Administration, the federal government's use of prizes and challenges increased exponentially, and we've heard that the current Administration is likewise interested in maximizing the use of such competitions. It is important for this Committee to periodically examine federal agencies' use of prizes authority, so I'm pleased that we're having this hearing this morning. Since World War II, the United States has become a leader in advancing science and innovation thanks in large part to long-term commitment of the federal government to research and development. Today, grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements form the cornerstone of government support for R&D. While these traditional research financing mechanisms continue to be critical, they also require a big upfront investment with no guarantee of success. For certain types of scientific and technological problems, prize competitions and challenges can stimulate major breakthroughs with little to no risk to the taxpayer. Science prizes and challenges, whether cash prizes or nonmonetary awards, incentivize creative approaches to bold but achievable goals. Early prize competitions dared inventors to do the unthinkable: to fly over the Atlantic Ocean, to determine longitude for accurate ship navigation, and to preserve food to feed an army on the battlefield. Achieving bold goals requires bold thinkers, and prize competitions and challenges often attract participants who do not typically seek government grants or contracts. The nation's advancement and innovation depends on thought leaders with a diversity of ideas and experience. I have long supported the use of prizes to promote the advancement of emerging technologies. I co-authored the H-Prize Act which became law in 2007. It has given the Department of Energy authority to conduct prize challenges for development of hydrogen as a transportation fuel. I also introduced a bill to provide prize authority to The National Science Foundation and supported the 2010 COMPETES reauthorization provision that provided broad prize authority to all federal agencies. And I'm soon going to be introducing a bill called the Challenges and Prizes for Climate Act, which will establish new prize competitions overseen by the Department of Energy to work toward breakthroughs in clean energy technology development and implementation and climate change adaptation and mitigation. I urge my colleagues to look at this bill and to consider co- sponsorship. One hundred federal agencies have offered 800 prizes since the launch of Challenge.gov in 2010. The NIST Head Health Challenge III is one such example, and I believe it may serve as a model for public-private collaboration in the development and implementation of a prize competition. As the witnesses describe their experience in the Head Health Challenge, I hope they'll leave us with their thoughts on how this challenge has changed the protective gear industry, why it was successful, and what if anything they might have improved in the design or implementation of the challenge. I also look forward to hearing what next steps are planned and underway to take advantage of the lessons learned and technological advances made during the three Head Health Challenges. Ensuring that the attention and excitement generated by challenge is effectively channeled into action upon its conclusion is one of the hardest parts of running an effective challenge, and I look forward to hearing from our witnesses their best ideas for doing that. I also look forward to Dr. Dehgan's testimony about his work launching USAID's global challenges for development and his current work to facilitate public-private partnerships for prizes and challenges. I believe he will help us understand the types of problems that are best solved through open innovation and some of the cutting-edge new ways prizes and challenges are being used. I also look forward to hearing his thoughts on how federal prize competitions and challenges best fit in the government's broader R&D portfolio. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I look forward to hearing from the witnesses this morning, and I yield back. [The prepared statement of Mr. Lipinski follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize myself for a five minute opening statement. The purpose of this morning's hearing is to review the results of the final phase of the Head Health Challenge, a significant public-private collaboration for public health and safety. This worthy event is cosponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and three private organizations: the National Football League, General Electric Corporation and Under Armour, Inc. The final phase of the Head Health Challenge is aimed at design and development of advanced materials to improve protective equipment and prevent head injuries in sports, industry, the military and others who are at a higher risk of head trauma. As a mom of three children who did play sports, the boys played football, my daughter played soccer, baseball--and I think we covered all the sports among the three of them--but now with five grandchildren, I really appreciate all of the work you're doing. It'll just be great for our children, as well as for our warriors and for our professional--I mean, there's just--this covers so many areas, so I'm just really excited about what you're doing for our entire community. These kinds of public-private science challenges have a long history of catalyzing innovation and creating solutions to difficult problems. For instance, the Longitude Prize of 1714, offered by the British Government, resulted in the marine chronometer and dramatically improved shipping safety. Napoleon Bonaparte's 1800 Food Preservation Prize led to development of canned foods. More recently, spurred by the clean-up problems after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2009, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE of $1 million demonstrated a technology that had more than four times the previous recovery rate for cleaning oil off the ocean's surface. In recent years, NIST and other federal agencies have organized and/or supported prize competitions and challenges that ranged from accelerating the development of autonomous vehicles to breakthroughs in facial recognition technology. NIST and other federal agencies are involved in a number of multi-agency and private-public challenge initiatives, for which I congratulate them. As my colleagues know, provisions of the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which originated in this Subcommittee, streamline prize competition procedures for federal science agencies and encourage them to consider them to stimulate problem-solving innovation. There is no shortage of priority research areas for which federal agencies should consider using prizes in the future. Health issues are at the top of my list because there is the potential to save many lives and also save huge sums of taxpayer money, as well as protect the quality of life in so many different areas. At the last hearing on this subject, subcommittee members and our witnesses discussed the potential for catalyzing development of portable dialysis devices. A breakthrough in portable dialysis would improve hundreds of thousands of lives and could save Medicare billions of dollars every year and again obviously improve the quality of life. Another terrible disease for which a public-private challenge prize might be considered is Alzheimer's disease. More than five million Americans live with Alzheimer's today, and that total could triple by 2050 if there aren't breakthroughs in prevention and treatments. Through support for basic research, through support for measurement science, through support for commercialization of taxpayer-funded research breakthroughs, and through science prize competitions, the top priority of the Science Committee is to encourage innovation and technological breakthroughs and advancements. Initiatives like the Head Health Challenge encourage individual incentive and inspire creative solutions. They leverage significant private sector investments in important national priorities, for instance, preventing serious head injuries. And they engage the brightest and most creative minds our nation has. We look forward to hearing from some of those best and brightest minds this morning, including Shawn Springs from Windpact, Inc., which is located in the 10th Congressional District of Virginia that I am proud to represent. I hope the stories of all our witnesses will help to inspire a new generation of scientists and entrepreneurs. [The prepared statement of Chairwoman Comstock follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. And I now recognize Mrs. Johnson, the Ranking Member, for her opening statement. Ms. Johnson. Thank you very much, and good morning. I'd like to thank Chairwoman Comstock and Ranking Member Lipinski for holding today's hearing on the NIST Head Health Challenge and the benefits and challenges of federal prize competitions. I support the federal government's use of prizes and challenges to spur innovation and technology breakthroughs. However, I want to begin with a brief comment about our larger commitment to research and development. I am deeply troubled that so many of our colleagues would support a tax bill that adds $1 trillion or more to the deficit while helping only the wealthiest among us and at the same time repeatedly vote to cut funding for research and so many other critical investments in our future. Many of my colleagues would even make it impossible for any but the wealthiest Americans to pursue graduate degrees in STEM because of proposed changes to the tax law. While tough choices have to be made, and I am confident the overwhelming majority of my colleagues on my side of the aisle are willing to have those discussions, cuts to our federal R&D enterprise weakens the country's ability to be a leader in innovation, economic growth, and job creation. No corporate tax cut will fix that. Our competitors have the same tough budget choices to make, yet they are not just maintaining their R&D investments but increasing them. While prizes and other types of challenges are not a substitute for the sustained investment in long-term national outlook that traditional federal R&D funding provides, they do have a role in how the government funds R&D. The prize authority granted to all federal agencies in 2010 COMPETES reauthorization stimulated a significant increase in agencies' use of such competitions of incentives, more high-risk, high- reward research. Prizes also help agencies to reach out to a broader partnership of researchers and innovators across all areas of science and technology. I'm encouraged by indications that the current Administration will continue support for prize competitions. With several years of experience to build out--to build on, there are many lessons learned on how to best design and implement successful prize initiatives. There's also a new category of prize design expertise both in the government and the private sector. The NIST Head Health Challenge III appears to be a good model for public-private partnership and for the use of a challenge competition to spur innovation that had largely stalled. I look forward to hearing from NIST and the participants in this challenge about what worked well and how any lessons learned might be applied to future challenges. I also look forward to a broader discussion on how best to incorporate prizes into our broader federal R&D agenda. I thank all of our witnesses for being here, and I yield back. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. I will now introduce our witnesses. Our first witness today is Dr. Michael--am I going to get this--Fasolka, okay, Acting Director of the Material Measurement Lab at NIST. MML, one of the seven research laboratories within NIST, did all the measurements and testing for the Head Health Challenge. This challenge was NIST's first prize competition conducted under the America COMPETES Act of 2010. We should also note that the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which was signed in the law in January 2017, included a number of provisions that originated in our Committee that are named in encouraging more activity like NIST co-sponsorship of the Head Health Challenge. Dr. Fasolka has held his current position since 2012 and is responsible for strategic planning, communications, and operations for the lab. He received a Bachelor's of Arts in Liberal Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and his Ph.D. in Material Science and Engineering from MIT. Now, our second witness today is Mr. Scott Kebschull, Vice President and Technical Director of Dynamic Research, Inc., DRI. He has been with DRI for over 30 years primarily working on crashworthiness and occupant protection for passenger cars, motorcycles, and off-road vehicles. He is an expert in multi- body and finite element computer simulation, the work that resulted in the team's winning of the Head Health Challenge grand prize. He holds a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Valparaiso University and a Master's of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California. Dr. Alex Dehgan, our third witness, is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Conservation X Labs. He recently served as the Chief Scientist at the U.S. Agency for International Development where he was the architect of a number of new agency institutions, including the Grand Challenges for Development program, which used prizes to open innovation and address the biggest emerging global challenges. To date, USAID has launched nine Grand Challenges for Development. Dr. Dehgan earned a Bachelor's of Science from Duke University, as well as a Master's of Science and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He also holds a J.D. from the University of California Hastings. Now, Mr. Shawn Springs, our final witness, is Chief Executive Officer of Windpact, a northern-Virginia-based safety technology company that I'm proud to have in the 10th District of Virginia that is leveraging its patented padding technology to improve impact performance in helmets and protective gear. Windpact participated in certain Head Health Challenge competitions resulting in a first-place victory in the 1st and Future competition, as well as an award under the HeadHealthTECH II challenge. From 1997 to 2010, Mr. Springs played football professionally for the Seattle Seahawks, the Washington Redskins, and the New England Patriots. It is that unique experience that he really brings a full range of experience, and also being a dad I'm sure, and I really appreciate your engagement on this issue. He holds a Bachelor's of Science in Sociology from Ohio State University, and while playing for the Seahawks, Mr. Springs continued his education by attending the University of Washington, where he was inducted into the Society of National Collegiate Scholars. So I now recognize Dr. Fasolka for five minutes to present his testimony. TESTIMONY OF DR. MICHAEL FASOLKA, ACTING DIRECTOR, MATERIAL MEASUREMENT LAB, NIST Dr. Fasolka. Good morning, and thank you for inviting me today. Before I begin my testimony, we have a short video about the Head Health Challenge III. [Video shown.] Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you so much. As a mom who would just wince at all those things as you see them on the field and everywhere else, it's exciting. And please, you don't have to take that out of your five minutes, so go ahead. Dr. Fasolka. Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Johnson, Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss NIST's role in the Head Health Challenge III, which advanced the materials used in protective gear and help small companies mature ideas into marketable products. Thank you for your attention to the video, which was made in 2015 when the semifinalists were announced. I'm pleased to testify today, along with the challenge grand prize winners who were named this past September. NIST helps to ensure the U.S. system of measurements is firmly grounded in sound scientific and technical principles. The Head Health Challenge III is just one example of how NIST measurement science helps industry overcome barriers to developing new products and to manufacture them efficiently and reliably. While NIST has a long history of inspiring solutions to difficult problems using challenges, this was our first offer of cash prizes through a public-private partnership. The Head Health Challenge III is just one aspect of the larger Head Health Initiative launched by GE and the National Football League in 2013 to quote, ``accelerate concussion research, diagnosis, and treatment.'' NIST and Under Armour joined with GE and the NFL on this challenge to spur development of improved impact-resistant materials. As you saw in the video NIST's role was to act as a neutral provider of various technical results for the challenge. One of the barriers to innovation in helmet design has been the lack of data of how well new materials absorb forces. More and better materials data helps manufacturers understand if developing a product with new material will result in improved performance. It is especially difficult to test how materials perform in real-world conditions such as when they are compressed, flexed, on a playing field, or in combat. Small and medium-size companies may not have the resources to develop such types of facilities, so for this challenge we build on NIST expertise and measurements of body armor for law enforcement to make new instruments for materials testing. We also created a method to measure the forces exerted on the material by a rotational--also called shear--impacts which are under-evaluated in today's protective gear. Many of the participants in this challenge said that they benefited from having their candidate materials assessed by NIST's new instruments. We tested the finalists' materials under a broad range of conditions: impact forces range from those seen in youth leagues to professional sports; test temperatures range from freezing to a hot summers day; and when we executed what might be a full season's worth of impacts about 20--1,200 hits. A panel of independent experts from industry, academia, and government evaluated the competitors' written proposals, their materials, along with the NIST test data to choose a winner. A collaborative team, Dynamic Research and 6D Helmets, clinched the grand prize of $500,000 provided by NIST. Their material reduces some impact measures by nearly 80 percent compared to the benchmark materials we examined and helps reduce the transmission of rotational forces. Beyond the prize money, the Head Health Challenge III generated terabytes of test data, which allowed some of the participants to inform computer models of how their materials respond to impacts. To serve the broader community, we will release to the public the data generated from our tests of the nonproprietary baseline materials we used. In addition, our new measurement capabilities will provide data for a materials genome approach to impact-resistant systems so that more people can benefit from higher-performing materials sooner. Since the launch of Head Health Challenge III, NIST has announced more prize competitions at the Challenge.gov website. We also established a NIST-wide community interested in using these mechanisms to further our mission. We greatly appreciate the efforts of the Members of this Committee and other Members of Congress to support federal agency use of prize competitions and challenges. Thank you very much. [The prepared statement of Dr. Fasolka follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. Mr. Kebschull. TESTIMONY OF MR. SCOTT A. KEBSCHULL, VICE PRESIDENT AND TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, DYNAMIC RESEARCH, INC. Mr. Kebschull. Good morning. My name is Scott Kebschull. I am Vice President and Technical Director of Dynamic Research, Inc., of Torrance, California. I want to thank Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski, Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Johnson, and fellow members of the Subcommittee on Research and Technology for the opportunity to speak to you today about the Head Health Challenge III. My company, DRI, partnered with 6D Helmets for the Head Health Challenge III prize competition to develop a material suitable for use in football helmets or other protective equipment that can better protect against traumatic brain injury. DRI is primarily involved in automotive research and testing, as well as helmet research and testing. 6D Helmets designs and manufactures helmets for bicycle and motorcycle riders that uses their patented omnidirectional suspension technology. 6D's role in this project was to provide the intellectual property and to fabricate the material samples for testing, and DRI's role was to manage the project, develop the simulation models, and optimize the geometry and material characteristics. Football helmets with foam liners have been around since the 1950s. With the latest helmets available on the market, fatal head injuries are rare, but concussions still occur frequently. Traditional helmet liners are made out of monolithic blocks of foam. When these blocks of foam are optimized for linear performance, in other words, their performance in a perpendicular impact, they are much too stiff in shear, as occurs in glancing impacts. It has been known for many years that absorbing the energy in linear impacts is important for head protection, and more recently, it has become clear that cushioning impacts that cause rotation of the head is also important to protecting against both severe brain injuries, as well as concussion. Therefore, our goal was to develop a multi-impact material that performs well in both linear and shear impacts over a wide range of impact severities. This is an early prototype of the material that we developed. They are based on 6D Helmet's omnidirectional suspension technology modified for multi-impact usage. The material comprises top and bottom layers of foam separated by a layer of foam columns glued to the top and bottom layers. As you might expect, since the layer of columns has quite a bit of empty space between the columns, this layer is softer in compression than the top and bottom layers. This provides good impact protection in lower speed, or minor, linear impacts. The layer of columns also allows the top layer to slide laterally relative to the bottom layer in order to mitigate shear impacts. The key breakthrough in our research was identifying a method for making the material softer in shear without changing the linear performance, which allows optimization of the material for both linear and shear performance. Now that we have won the Head Health Challenge III Grand Prize, our next step is to incorporate this material into a football helmet and optimize it for both linear and shear impacts in severe and also relatively minor impacts. The research which has brought us to the point where we are now would not have been possible without the Head Health Challenge competition. The announcement of the competition solicited 125 ideas for improved materials. From that 125, the judging panel selected the most promising five finalists to receive first-round funding to develop their ideas, and of those five, we were selected the Grand Prize winner. This approach in my opinion proved to be a cost-effective way of soliciting a wide variety of ideas from bright people around the country to find potential solutions to a very difficult problem. Without the science prize competition format, the judging panel would not have seen these 125 ideas and would not have benefited from seeing how the five selected ideas could be developed. In addition, there would not have been the added benefit of competition. It's difficult to quantify, but for me, the competition aspect was a great motivator. We spent hours poring over our simulation models, brainstorming ideas about how to achieve the best results, and wondering what our competition was up to. In my view, some problems, such as the one we're talking about today, have proved to be difficult for the private sector to solve alone. Funding is very difficult to come by for ideas that have not yet reached a particular level of development, but ideas cannot reach that level of development without funding. For these problems, one of the ways that the federal government can spur innovation is through the use of science prize competitions. In partnership with key stakeholders from the private sector who can provide much-needed financial and technical resources, I believe these competitions can result in revolutionary breakthroughs. The concussion problem is most visible at the NFL and college levels, but the benefits of improved helmets can go well beyond that. Over one million kids play high school tackle football in the United States, as well as over one million younger children. Protecting them needs to be a high priority. The materials that we are developing also holds promise for other types of helmets. 6D has already incorporated the key breakthrough that I mentioned earlier into its latest cycling helmet that recently arrived on the market. Potentially, this material could also be used in other multi-impact helmets such as hockey or lacrosse helmets, in other protective equipment such as shoulder pads, in flooring or turf sub-surfaces, or in protective crash barriers on roadways. In view of my experience with the Head Health Challenge and the important strides that have been made towards improved head impact protection, I would urge you to continue to support science prize competitions. Thank you for your time. [The prepared statement of Mr. Kebschull follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you very much. And now, we will hear from Dr. Dehgan. TESTIMONY OF DR. ALEX O. DEHGAN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER AND FOUNDER, CONSERVATION X LABS Dr. Dehgan. Good morning. Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Johnson, Chairwoman Comstock, Ranking Member Lipinski, and other esteemed Members of the Subcommittee, thank you very much for the opportunity to present today. We face many challenges as a country. Many of those increasingly fail to respect political boundaries, state sovereignty, even military force. Mr. Lipinski. Excuse me, Dr. Dehgan, is the microphone on or you need to move it closer to you. Dr. Dehgan. Oh, I'm so sorry. There are challenges that come from scientific competition with new powers that seek to claim our place as America's greatest--as the world's greatest economy and scientific engine. We've seen that our solutions tend to be linear but the problems are exponential, so we need to incentivize the revolutionary over the evolutionary and broaden the available solutions in our scientific and technical arsenal. Much as we've created many of these problems, we possess the abilities to address them by harnessing American ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Many of these grand challenges are actually grand opportunities, and we can use the power of open innovation to transform the very realm of what is possible, to democratize our ability to solve the challenges that face our nation, and to accelerate and fully harness our nation's ingenuity. You've heard about my fellow witnesses, about the power of open innovation for the Head Health Challenge. I want to make the case for their larger use. The basic value proposition is this: Instead of looking for the needle in haystack, you're incentivizing the needle to find you, right? Open innovation through prizes, challenges, advanced market commitments solve a fundamental problem that we face in government, that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not. They allow government to be in the business of creating greater opportunity to harness American talent to solve our most pressing problems, to unlock creativity, to break down barriers between scientific fields that are frequently stovepiped. I want to go through some of the benefits of open innovation. Next slide, please. [Slide.] First, and this is very relevant to Congress, they are efficient and careful uses of American taxpayer dollars. They are pay-for-success mechanisms rather than pray-for-success mechanisms. They serve as forms of procurement reform that allow anyone to be able to solve the problem and even can eliminate sources of bias. They leverage additional funds by the innovators. They have low monitoring costs of fund disbursements. They have simple application processes. They were procurement performed for USAID in terms of who could come, and because of that, 50 percent of the applications actually came out of the developing world, came from sectors that never approached our agency before, and they could also jumpstart very importantly the flow of private capital. They help create new solutions and support out-of-the-box thinking. Because they're focused on the problem and not the solution, they don't constrain the potential innovation space but can draw from new sectors. They can bring in new solvers by mobilizing new talent to what seem to be intractable problems. The history of science is filled with instances of outsiders proposing novel and ultimately revolutionary solutions to problems that insiders had failed to solve. They attract a diverse group of experts, of practitioners, of laypeople regardless of formal credentials to try to take them on. And we saw that--again, that many of the applicants to the Grand Challenges for Development of USAID were first-time applicants to the agency, and that was important for us. I want to give one quick example which was Saving Lives at Birth, and it was our very first grand challenge. And it was fundamentally about two problems. How do we ensure that we can provide access to world-class health care to women and children from the onset of labor to 48 hours after delivery, and how do we do so whether--where they give birth, whether in a hospital or a hut, to make that distinction of where they give birth irrelevant to their ultimate success in what we're trying to do? The reason is we can't afford to build hospitals in every village around the world. We can't afford to train doctors. We can't afford to actually provide the equipment that they needed. So how in the absence of that could we achieve our mission on global health as an agency? And what we found was an outpouring of ideas and innovations that we never even saw before, including one that came from an Argentinian car mechanic that was the first new tool for obstructed labor in 40 years. We never could've seen that. Others came from undergrads, biomedical engineers at Duke and Rice University that are now scaling up. All these tools are now scaling up worldwide. Finally, prizes and challenges I think can help create new industries. The history of prizes and challenges are filled with that. Napoleon's food preservation prize helped--led to canning, the billiard prize to replace ivory led to plastics, the Orteig Prize helped create the commercial airline industry, the Ansari X prize helped with the private spacecraft industry, and the DARPA Grand Challenge led to self-driving cars. These are great opportunities for our country. Prizes and challenges, they don't work for every case and every situation, but they're a tool within our arsenal to be able to use to advance American innovation. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Dr. Dehgan follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr. Springs for his testimony. TESTIMONY OF MR. SHAWN SPRINGS, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, WINDPACT Mr. Springs. Good morning, Chairwoman Comstock and Ranking Member Lipinski and distinguished Members of the Subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in today's discussion on the Head Health Challenge. My name is Shawn Springs. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Windpact, a northern-Virginia-based safety technology company I founded in 2011. Windpact is an innovative startup with a goal to become the most advanced impact protection company in the world. We leverage our patented Crash Cloud technology to improve impact performance in helmets and protective gear. Learning and accepting the guidance from the medical community, our aim is to be the catalyst of innovation for impact protection technology so manufacturers can build better products for their customers. Windpact partners with top equipment brands to improve products by replacing their existing padding with our Crash Cloud technology. We are working with multiple customers across sports and recreation, including football, baseball, lacrosse, and hockey brands, and are in negotiating partnerships in other sectors, including the military and automotive. My inspiration for founding Windpact stems from my desire to make playing sports safer for the next generation of athletes. I spent 20 years playing football, including 13 years in the National Football League. Windpact has participated in a few Head Health Challenge competitions resulting in a first-place victory in the First and Future Competition, which was held during Super Bowl weekend down in Houston, partnering with the NFL and Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world. There were 200 participants, and we were fortunate to come out and win our category for best materials for the game, as well as an award under the HeadHealthTECH Challenge--a group of challenges launched over the last 12 months through collaboration with NFL and Duke University's Clinical and Translational Science Institute. We won our second award. As a startup company, gaining access to, and trust from, larger brands can be a challenge. As a recipient of multiple awards, we have found that a formal acknowledgement and support of our technology by an institution like NIST or Duke University's Clinical and Translational Science Institute through the HeadHealthTECH program provides welcome validation and legitimacy to our own findings. I strongly believe that public-private science prize competitions are invaluable to the advancement of player safety. The NFL has done a good job the past few years partnering with corporations and research facilities to encourage the improvement of the technology to protect its players. Having sustained concussions and witnessed concussions among friends and teammates, I developed a sense of urgency and obligation to work towards a solution and affect change. It's important to me to protect the future of players from injury and make both the game I love and other sports safer. There has been a growing negative attention directed to sports in the past few years with the elevated awareness of concussions and injury, resulting in a reduced participation, especially at the youth level. I feel strongly that is the opposite reaction that we need. Team sports and recreational activities are invaluable in what they provide to our communities and children. While football has received the bulk of the attention for injuries to its athletes, they are now also receiving compliments for the work they are doing to spur innovators, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers to build the next generation of protective gear. It's imperative for other industries to follow suit by creating their own initiatives to improve safety. Protecting our loved ones with better equipment is Windpact's mission statement, but it is also a common goal for parents, players, coaches, emergency responders, and military personnel as well. Our experience has been that public-private science prize is an excellent way to spur innovation and speed up much-needed improvements to the market. The right partners and support of the funding program like Head Health Challenge are providing opportunities to young companies beyond what otherwise would be accessible to them. I recommend the continued exploration and investment in these types of competitions across sports and beyond. Another operation is needed to continue to update and modernize standards. This underscores the need to update standards as go hand-in-hand with private sector innovation. Windpact welcomes the opportunity to participate in future challenges. Science prize competitions spur innovation, and that requires significant capital investment. Thank you for the opportunity to offer my testimony, and I look forward to answering any questions. [The prepared statement of Mr. Springs follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you so much. And I really thank the witnesses for their testimony. And in addition to the testimony submitted by our witnesses today, I ask unanimous consent that the written testimony submitted by Mr. Robert Reisinger, Cofounder and Director of Engineering at 6D Helmets and co-winner of the Head Health Challenge be included in the record. He was invited to testify today but unfortunately was unable to attend. So without objection, so ordered. [The information follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Comstock. And I now recognize myself for five minutes for questions. Mr. Springs, I really appreciate your goal of becoming the most advanced impact protection company in the world and having it right in Loudoun County in the 10th District. You know, we know how important this is in sports, but as number of you have mentioned, head injuries particularly in construction continue to be a serious issue, obviously, our warriors, accidental falls are a problem with the elderly, and so these innovations that your company is working on, can you draw on a little bit how they are going to be applicable to preventing head injuries in the workplace, in the military, in homes, in healthcare settings? And then I'll just add a little bit, too, also about how we sell changing this concept to teams and team sports and how we move that in and get people to adapt, maybe engage parents and sort of a community engagement on this and understanding the issue. Mr. Springs. Right. When I founded Windpact, I believed there was an opportunity to bridge the gap because I spent several times listening to the hearings on concussions and traumatic brain injuries, and I believed there was a real opportunity because innovation had lagged for 30 years in football. There needed to be a bridge between what the really smart people like many of these panelists here today who were trying to figure out how the brain works on rotational impacts and how you lower peak linear accelerations, and the guys who are building products--companies like Riddell. I believe that there still is a knowledge gap. My goal when I started Windpact was take our technology, learn from the smart doctors and some of the researchers at places like NIST, take those learnings and findings, apply our technology to build safer helmets. So we consider ourselves an ingredient brand. We work with large host brands in retrofitting their old solutions with our new technology to make their product better for the consumer. Basically, we try to make sure we understand what the medical professionals were saying, as well as the parents and others who are buying the product for their kids. Chairwoman Comstock. Great. Thank you. And, others, if you'd like to engage on that question, how do we sell this to the public at broad and understand all the cross benefits from it in so many different areas? Sure. Mr. Kebschull. Yes, if I may, one of the things that has become clear to me is that these kind of innovations have a lot of spillover into far greater areas than what we're really targeting. I mean, in the Head Health Challenge III we were targeting football helmets was really kind of our main focus, maybe other protective equipment as well, but we started brainstorming other ideas where this kind of material could be used, and we were coming up with things like roadside barriers, you know, protective equipment for the--where there are construction zones and things like that, which are hazardous areas right now. And we think our material concept can be applied to those other areas as well, and to date, nobody's really started talking that much about that kind of approach. Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. And as another area, you know, we know links now from head injuries and dementia and even possibly Alzheimer's. Is this another area where, as you have that improvement, whether it's in sports or other areas, that it also has that down-the-road impact of maybe lessening what we're seeing in dementia or Alzheimer's to the extent that we have knowledge about that now? Mr. Kebschull. Yes, I was talking to a medical doctor who was working in the field of brain trauma, and they're approaching the concussion problem from another aspect, from kind of a nutritional supplement aspect that would--I'm not sure on the details--some kind of antioxidants that would protect against long-term damage from repeated impacts. But they were also hopeful that that would apply then to Alzheimer's field as well, so it's possible that the plaques that are developing in the brain--and I don't understand all the medical issues very well--but those could be protected by this same kind of nutritional supplement that could protect concussion injuries as well. Chairwoman Comstock. Excellent. Anyone else want to jump in? Dr. Dehgan, I just wanted to thank you. I loved your characterization of how you--you know, for us incentivizing the needle to find us and really getting outside the box on this, so I thought you really captured that well, and I think the importance of this is capturing the public's imagination. And, Mr. Springs, bringing your experience into it I think really does kind of sell the idea to the public at large in so many areas, so thank you for vividly, you know, describing that and capturing that for us. Thank you. I'll now yield to Mr. Lipinski for five minutes. Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. As I mentioned in my opening statement, federal funding for R&D traditionally comes through grants and contracts, investments in research and infrastructure, and I don't think I want anyone to think listening to this hearing that we are suggesting otherwise, that this is just an easy way to save money because I think it's important that we keep funding to the way we've traditionally done the funding. I think this is just a way to add to that to really unleash and find in places that we would-- someplace we would expect to find them and we're not finding as much as we have--you know, as we should be able to I think in our research universities to sort of unleash that--you know, the entrepreneurial spirit there and all the way, too, as Dr. Dehgan talked about, the auto mechanic in Argentina coming up with a solution through a challenge. So I want to start out by asking Dr. Dehgan. To what extent and how should agencies integrate prize and challenge competitions into this broader federal R&D? Dr. Dehgan. It's a phenomenal question and important. The standard for us is they should be used when there's a clear and measurable outcome defined in advance, and in particular where the objective is clear but the way to achieve it is not, right? And it allows us to do one thing. There is this incredible democratization of science and technology that has happened, just the prices of processors and the power of processors and memory and--has increased exponentially but decreased exponentially in cost. We have incredible opportunities for iteration of design thanks to additive printing. We have greater connectivity and access to knowledge ever than before. That has allowed for a greater democratization of science and technology. That allows us to capture many other people, but we still need basic research to be able to create the underlying basis for that democratization of science and technology. We still need to advance what we are doing in creating the diversity of potential solutions and the advances of knowledge to be able to solve many of these problems, but we can harness them in new ways and in complementary ways particularly where we are stuck on a particular problem or where that problem has tended to focus on a single discipline where we can cross and capture the potential of other disciplines to help contribute to solving that problem. And that's where I think prizes and challenges work really well is where do we want to capture the democratization of science and technology? Where do we want to actually make use of the existing funded research and particular broaden the number of disciplines that are involved beyond it, where do we want to actually inspire the public, and where can we actually unlock private capital? Because I think that has been one of the great things. The DARPA Grand Challenge for the self- driving car was for the marines, but the application is a revolution that we probably couldn't have foreseen or DARPA couldn't have foreseen 13 years ago. Mr. Lipinski. Dr. Dehgan--and I also want to ask Dr. Fasolka--any recommendations on what can be done better by federal agencies to design these challenges? Dr. Fasolka. This being the first challenge that we did under the new authority under AICA, NIST really learned that having a community of practice within the organization that really knew a lot about how to implement the authority, how to use it to work in a private-public partnership, how to effectively communicate the challenge to folks. That was what we learned at NIST is that having in terms of advice that you can get, guidance that you can get or how to implement these challenges, there's a lot more out now than there was when we started. So what we learned is that the more that you know about how to get into these things and properly manage them, it can stop--some of the things that we did when we started, We were going to for the first time give cash, for the first time work with--in a public-private partnership, for the first time do something where NIST would be receiving materials to test. And so it took us a long time to get up to speed and actually launch it and probably longer than we expected going into it. Mr. Lipinski. Dr. Dehgan? Dr. Dehgan. Yes, so elements of good design, I think this idea of a challenge creating a community of practice is really important because what you're trying to do is create an ecosystem of solutions. And I think we have focused on the competitive aspects of challenges, but there's also collaborative aspects of challenges. How do you advance knowledge overall in terms of what you're trying to do? How do you actually capture the losers in the challenge and make sure that they benefit? Scale has to be built in at the beginning within what we're trying to do, so thinking about what happens after the challenge, how do we benefit the companies that are taking on these solutions and helping them implement what they're doing into helmets, into every aspect of American life is really important. Leverage is great and leverage allows you to mitigate risk and have greater impact, so thinking about who your partners are within you doing the challenge. And then even things like--it is clear that money is insufficient by itself--is one great benefit of potential challenges but, as Mr. Springs pointed out, the recognition is really important because that can untap investment. That can bring credibility to people, so thinking carefully about the prize purse and the benefits are critical. And one of the things just to recognize about challenges-- and it's a limiting factor--is we are shifting the risk. Because it is pay-for-performance, we're shifting the risk on the innovators, right? We're asking them. So the benefit that we are providing them has to be commiserate with the risk that we're asking them to take within it. And the last--just two other things. I think we--our prizes and challenges should be audacious but achievable, so we do want to inspire that public imagination that Chairwoman Comstock talked about. And the other piece is that even failure is instructive. The first DARPA Grand Challenge no one won, right, but we have a self-driving car industry because they continued to do that two more times and learn from that. Mr. Lipinski. Thank you. I yield back. Chairwoman Comstock. I now recognize Mr. Marshall for five minutes. Mr. Marshall. Thank you, Chairwoman. I continue to believe that innovation is going to do more to drive the cost of health care, the money spent on health care, down than any piece of legislation that we can write. And this is one more example. If these concussions weren't happening, we wouldn't be spending money on MRIs and CAT scans and ER visits and overnight stays at the hospitals. I think I'll go with my first question to Dr. Fasolka. Like many of us, we've had children play football. My youngest son, an all-state running back, not quite as fast as Mr. Springs or quite as big but was certainly a great football kid--had three concussions. Those were some of the longest days of my life watching my son not be himself, not knowing maybe who he was, where he was, just kind of in a third world almost. And at the time I did research. Other kids with concussions and it was-- Kevlar was about the only thing on the market that I saw, so my question for Dr. Fasolka is how much better are these new materials than Kevlar is, 20 percent better, 100 percent better? If you--you're the--go ahead. Dr. Fasolka. The measurements that we did in our challenge prize showed that compared to baseline materials, the kind of foams that Mr. Kebschull mentioned, that they could improve impact absorption sometimes 80 percent better than what we saw in the sort of old technology. But what's more important is the ability for the material to mitigate these rotational forces, these shear forces. And this is really the thing that makes these new technology special. Mr. Marshall. Did you measure Kevlar as well? Was that one of your base materials that you tested? Dr. Fasolka. No, the baseline materials that we tested were basically foam rubber that you would see in a helmet technology, so just the pad---- Mr. Marshall. The traditional---- Dr. Fasolka. --right? Mr. Marshall. The state-of-the-art helmet? Dr. Fasolka. State-of-the-art helmet. Mr. Marshall. Did anybody else test it against Kevlar--I'm just curious--in anything? Okay--go ahead. Dr. Fasolka. Yes, Kevlar--I mean, we test Kevlar at NIST-- -- Mr. Marshall. Okay. Dr. Fasolka. --but usually, it's for ballistic protection. Mr. Marshall. Okay. Dr. Fasolka. Yes. Mr. Marshall. There was products on the market with Kevlar, and that's what I---- Dr. Fasolka. Yes. Mr. Marshall. --purchased and tried. That's the best thing I could find at the time. I'll go to Mr. Springs next. Tell me a little bit about turf material. Have you done any work with turf material and any thoughts on that? Mr. Springs. We have not done any work on turf material. There are companies who are innovating on new solutions that can go underneath the turf. I think Viconic is one that comes to mind that you might have seen in NFL commercials. I would say one of the things that's important from our perspective as a startup company is that innovation can be sparked by money and the partnerships, as well as the learning from NIST and universities like Duke--when we won the HeadHealthTECH challenge working with Duke University and those guys holding our hand through the process was really good. So it goes beyond money. It's about the partnerships and the relationships and the validation. Winning the award at Texas Medical Center as well, the validation helps. Mr. Marshall. Certainly from my experience I think that 2/3 of the concussions I saw in football were related to the heads hitting--going backwards---- Mr. Springs. Yes. Mr. Marshall. --and getting hit, and I think that the incidence of concussions doubled when our high school went from a traditional field to a turf, and it's my belief there needs to be national standards of what this turf needs to be made out of and that you all should be testing it and saying, look, if we're going to subject our kids to this, that this is the standard. Is anybody seeing anything in your industry going towards that? Mr. Springs. Well, I think it's there. You've got to look at the turf. I think you also have to look at the rules of the game. I know that in the Ivy League, Dartmouth was one of the first schools who actually took tackling out of practice and reduced concussions by 70 percent, so as I see it--it's looking at the materials, the way the helmets being built, the surface the game is played on, as well as the rules of the game, I think it's a collaboration of all those things coming together. Mr. Marshall. Is anybody else seeing as much work with the turf as they are with the helmets? I think it's half the--at least half the equation. Mr. Springs, back to you. The NFL is certainly the gold standard, and all of us--Great Bend High School now uses a super concussion protocol. It's so much better than it used to be, and we are doing it by the book. There's no more pressure from the coaches that, ``Hey, your kid's the star running back; he's got to get back in there for this big game.'' That stigmata has gone away. Is your impression of the NFL that maybe some of that traditional ``You just got to toughen up and get back in there,'' do you think it's improving? Is NFL doing everything that they can do to help us lead the way? Mr. Springs. Well, I think the awareness at the parent level and at the youth level, moms are more concerned. Moms and the whole community as a whole are getting better in understanding concussions. When I came up, my generation, they would tell you to just sniff a little smelling salt and go back in. Now, I think teachers, parents, coaches, everybody who's involved with youth or kids playing a sport is aware of the seriousness of traumatic brain injury and concussions. Mr. Marshall. How about the NFL? Do you think---- Mr. Springs. But to answer your question---- Mr. Marshall. --what's the culture over there? Mr. Springs. --I think the guys who are playing in the NFL today are more aware of the seriousness of traumatic brain injury. We saw what happened a few weeks ago when Ryan Shazier was hit in the Steelers-Cincinnati game, and I believe every player is aware of the seriousness of sports injuries. I think the NFL is also doing its best in trying to educate the players as well. Mr. Marshall. Chairwoman, can I have another minute since there's nobody else back yet? Or we can go across the aisle and come back to me if you want to if we have time. Okay. I want to talk to the military just a second. I'm more concerned about mini-concussions, just a chronicity of mini-concussions than I am one big blow. And one of my theories is posttraumatic stress disorder may be related to this--these hundreds and thousands of mini-concussions. Have any of you done any research or what are we doing for our soldiers to help with those mini-concussions? I think you sit next to a tank or you're in a tank and a boom goes off, you can feel the force of it even though you have hearing stuff in but there's got to be just some incredible forces going on. Anybody touch the military more so? Go ahead. Mr. Kebschull. We did a little bit of work with military helmets in our impact test lab and in our other research, and military helmets are--most of the effort that goes into designing military helmets is for ballistics. And I think impact protection is kind of an afterthought. I don't mean to be too harsh on the people who do those helmets, but they have multiple pads in them, and those pads are Velcroed in so they're configurable. And you can imagine that in hot climates like Iraq or Afghanistan the soldier is saying I'm going to go with just--take several of the pads out of there and I'll get a lot more ventilation and it'll be a lot more comfortable. So I think there does need to be more research done on military helmets with respect to impact protection and not just the ballistic protection. Mr. Marshall. Okay. All right. Thank you, Chairwoman. I yield back. Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you, very instructive. I appreciate it. And I now recognize Mrs. Johnson. Ms. Johnson. Thank you very much. I'd like to hear from each one of you as it relates to the topic since there are many questions now about injuries to the brain but I want to especially ask Mr. Springs. Mr. Springs, I know your father and his Dallas family extremely well, and you must be a very proud son. The products that have been designed to attempt to avoid some of the injuries that have been talked about to the brain in the field of football, have you seen any results or have you been able to tell that you're on the right track? Mr. Springs. I believe there are companies out there in the last five years who have looked at the seriousness and are getting the push from parents to build better products, so I'm excited about the future of technology. There's one thing I will say there. Innovation, in football particularly, has come a long way since the Virginia Tech standard. That came out only five years ago when the Virginia Tech star rating, which talks about the risk of concussion. When that came out, there was only one five-star and now there's 13 in football. I think other industries like hockey and baseball will follow suit as their standards and scoring systems to rate these helmets, it will continue to improve. I will also say that more of these manufacturers are receptive or open to new innovation from the outside where maybe five years ago that wasn't the case. So I'm encouraged by the fact that there are large brands who are looking for outside technology like our technology and what 6D uses in their motocross helmets and their helmets as well. So I believe--I am encouraged that the direction of technology is improving. I do believe that we need to also update our standards so companies like Windpact and other companies who are innovating technology, the standards are on the same page and speed of innovation. Ms. Johnson. Thank you. Any other comments? Mr. Kebschull. I would just like to follow up on what Mr. Springs said about the Virginia Tech star rating system for football helmets. That's another aspect where you're looking at a competition. It's not a prize competition, but it's a competition that results in better helmets. And standards alone are just a minimum bar that people have to meet in order to sell a helmet, and what happens when there's only a standard and no star rating system or other kind of competitive system is that everybody just gets themselves over the bar and they don't have this kind of innovation that develops better products. Ms. Johnson. Thank you. Yes? Dr. Fasolka. The standards now, too, are really aimed at these sort of linear impacts still, and so this is one of the things that NIST would like to help with is to begin to help the private sector. These are consensus standards from industry, so that body be able to underpin new standards with the new science that we're learning about how shear is important, rotation is important, and if they can properly measure that. Ms. Johnson. Any other comments from anyone? Dr. Dehgan. Just one thought. I'm not an expert in football unfortunately, but one of the ways that we could use which is a subset of prizes which are called advanced market commitments as a way of doing--how do you deal with this challenge of standards being that minimum bar. So could--you know, how can the government actually work together to organize high schools, colleges, professional leagues to say we will buy all the helmets that are made that involve a 50 percent decrease in concussions. The Department of Energy did this with rooftop air- conditioning units. They had the big box storse say we're going to create the incentive for a market if you guys can improve the energy efficiency of these units. Not a dollar of federal taxpayer funds were used in doing that, but there was investment that was created and a drive that was created to be able to meet those incentives because there was an established market. At USAID and Gates, we created the global vaccine initiative, GAVI, actually around the same idea to create an advanced market commitment for neglected tropical diseases, so this is one way to think about how we may get around that problem. Ms. Johnson. My time is about expired, but I want to ask if--do you think that it's appropriate that some additional research be funded by the government since this is such a broad spectrum sport and not just football but--and we are seeing more and more questions about the injuries to the point where parents are beginning to be a little skeptical of their children going into the profession. It does concern me. I'm a strong Dallas Cowboys fan from the beginning until now, and I know that this is mostly Redskin country, and I do pull for Redskins now and then when they're not playing the football team called Cowboys, America's team, but I really am very interested in this because I think it does have a very wide interest of the public. Thank you. Chairwoman Comstock. Okay. Thank you. I now recognize Ms. Bonamici for five minutes. Ms. Bonamici. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Comstock and Ranking Member Lipinski, for this good bipartisan discussion. I really appreciate it. I want to just first mention I appreciated the discussion between Mr. Marshall and Mr. Springs. When I was in the Oregon Legislature, serving on the Education Committee we had this very poignant hearing where a father came in and his son was basically unable to continue learning, had serious brain injury. He thought it was because of the helmet, but after many hearings and talking with healthcare experts, it's because he had multiple concussions and was sent back into the game after his concussions had healed. And we ended up actually passing a requirement that someone with training in concussion identification had to authorize a student to go back into the game. And lest anyone think that people complained about that being overregulation, the coaches really appreciated it because it got them off the hook. There wasn't the pressure. They could say, ``I can't send you back into the game because I have to have this expert opinion.'' But then I also wanted to follow up on the conversation about the troops and--that Mr. Kebschull was talking about and how do we make sure that our troops get the protection they need and deserve. And it reminded me of visiting Oregon Aero, which is a company in the district in northwest Oregon I'm honored to represent. They make seating systems for aircrafts and also make ballistic helmet pads and liners. And when I was out there touring, talking with them a while back, they were mentioning that the military used to buy the product but then they found something less expensive. And then they showed me. And in fact I was just looking at the current blog. There's a nonprofit organization that was founded to help get their product to the troops because our military is not buying them because they found something less expensive. There are so many complaints. The current helmet pads--troops are complaining they're stiff, they give them headaches, they don't make the helmet fit properly, they get too hot, they get too cold, so they take them out, and then they're at great risk. So this nonprofit was formed to help get the pads to the troops because they'll leave them in. They can wear their helmets and protect their brains, and they've now--this nonprofit organization has now sent more than 88,000 of these upgrade kits to our troops overseas, so that's not really the best model. So I guess my question maybe to the panel is when there is something that's a good product like that, how do--you know, making change at the Department of Defense and the Pentagon is really not that easy. How do we make sure that our troops are getting what they need? And maybe NIST can start. How do we convince the Department of Defense if there's a product that's really helping? Maybe it's a little more expensive, but taking care of brain damage is really--and PTSD is really expensive as well. Dr. Fasolka. Well, we have talked to the Army in particular about this, and they are aware that the technology in the helmets right now for this kind of padding is out of date. I think that this is one of the reasons why this challenge is important, these kinds of challenges are important because of this broad effect that they can have by bringing innovations forward. And so they're quite interested in learning about what came out of ours. Ms. Bonamici. I'm glad to hear that because it was a while back when I was learning this from Oregon Aero. And so they've known that they've been out of date for a long time, so I'm just saying we need to have a conversation. And hopefully the work that you're doing is going to help with that. You know, we here in Congress have an app challenge, so certainly--I have seen just from the very small scale congressional district high school students who submit their innovation to the app challenge, we know what can come from this sort of competition and prize. But one of the concerns at that level I always think, ``Oh my gosh, who's going to judge this?'' How do you--in a prize competition like this, how do you set up the metrics for, you know, clear expectations and success? And then how do you deal with things like intellectual property rights? So I'll let, you know, all of you address that as well. Dr. Fasolka. So we thought a lot about this of course, and so we had some metrics that were real scientific metrics like you'd see in a grant. What's the level of innovation? What's the level of being ready to be commercialized? Then we had a lot of hard numbers in the competition as well. They had to take 1,200 hits without failing. They had to work at hot and cold temperatures, so to really think about, well, what's the environment that these materials have to be in? In terms of intellectual property, yes, there was no interest in the government from our perspective in acquiring anything. This is their property. Our job was to spur innovation, so that's an easy answer for us. Ms. Bonamici. Well, as my time is expired, I just want to close by saying that we are a country that is proud of its innovators. And this type of prize and competition is certainly one step, but there's a lot of other things we can be doing. And I know Ms. Johnson mentioned the graduate students' tuition waiver and the tax bill. I'm happy to say that at least after the vote, many members who actually supported the bill have sent a letter now opposing the repeal of that income exclusion for tuition waiver. So we can't inhibit our young people and our students from becoming innovators who may solve these next challenges. So I hope that whatever tax bill comes out fixes that as well. So thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back. Chairwoman Comstock. I thank you. And actually I recognize Mr. Marshall for one more minute, another question. Mr. Marshall. Sorry, I'm pretty inquisitive. Chairwoman Comstock. Dr. Marshall, sorry. Mr. Marshall. That's all right. Wichita State University has a creation center, and they are able to use artificial intelligence to--in their case to say design the perfect, most structurally sound wing for an airplane or a jet with the least material. And I'm just curious if you've tried to use artificial intelligence to drive the perfect helmet, the perfect turf, the perfect--what we're trying to get at here if you guys are using artificial intelligence in any way in your companies? Mr. Kebschull. Well, it's not quite artificial intelligence in the traditional sense, but we did have an optimization software and an optimization procedure which seeks to find the path to the right material. So we're--we input--the inputs to it are the parameters and what ranges you'll allow it to have, you know, between the stiffness of X and Y or a dimension between A and B and so on. And then the software will run multiple, multiple simulations in order to try and find the optimum solution, so it's a way of optimization that's a little bit different than artificial intelligence, but it's maybe a little bit along those lines. Mr. Marshall. I think the shear force is especially--the artificial intelligence may be able to help us to figure out not just what material but how to place it. Dr. Fasolka, are you guys doing anything at NIST with it? Dr. Fasolka. Yes. The place for artificial intelligence at NIST is really within the Materials Genome Initiative, which is---- Mr. Marshall. The what, I'm sorry? Dr. Fasolka. The Materials Genome Initiative. Mr. Marshall. Okay. Dr. Fasolka. It's a multiagency initiative. It's DOD, DOE, NIST, NSF really aimed at accelerating materials design and deployment. And using these kind of techniques so that the idea of course is to have a design-forward sort of approach, a lot of computation, ways of optimizing it. Artificial intelligence is sort of a continuum from of modeling to something that really looks like a human brain thinking about things. But in the middle, you know, we're using these very clever computational techniques to get to an optimum---- Mr. Marshall. Yes. Dr. Fasolka. --so we are partnering as the next step in our research using Materials Genome Initiative approach with our Center of Excellence and the Center of Excellence for Hierarchical Materials Design in the Chicago area to really have a Use Case that can use these kind of artificial intelligence approaches to design materials that do exactly what you're talking about, really optimize the shear response, optimize while keeping that compression response. So yes. So that's what we're embarking on next. Mr. Marshall. Thank you. Chairwoman Comstock. Thank you. And I now recognize Mr. Lipinski for some additional questions. Mr. Lipinski. I thank the Chairwoman for yielding the additional time here. I wanted to follow up. I asked Dr. Fasolka and Dr. Dehgan about anything--any recommendations they had for what the--what federal agencies could do better in designing these challenges. So I want to ask Mr. Kebschull and Mr. Springs if they had any thoughts on the design and also the, you know, follow up of the--of challenges, if anything could be done better. So, Mr. Kebschull? Mr. Kebschull. Yes, thank you. From my viewpoint it went extremely well. The one thing I would've probably preferred was to see perhaps clearer targets being set. We were given a very vague direction in that make your material better, make it perform well in linear and shear impacts, but we didn't really know how good is good or what is it that--exactly that you're looking for. And, for example, the shear test was not developed until pretty well into the process, so I kind of felt like we were playing catch-up along the way. But overall, I have mainly good things to say about NIST because they were really helpful in getting us the data that we needed in order to validate and use our computer simulation models. Mr. Lipinski. Mr. Springs, anything that you would care to add? Mr. Springs. Yes, to follow up a little bit on that is kind of what you said, Dr. Dehgan--did I say that correctly? It might have been a lot of tackles. Clear and measurable are the words I heard, and that's kind of as a young company you want to be exact--because your resources are limited, you want to be exacting on what you're trying to achieve, what the outcome may be from the funding, or what you can ask for. And I think that's critical for any company just have a clear understanding of what it takes or what are the measurables or what you need to get to solve for, the steps you need to solve for, and just make it clear and easy so that everyone can understand it. Mr. Lipinski. All right. Thank you. Chairwoman Comstock. Well, thank all of you. This has been a great hearing. I really appreciate all your expertise. Thank you for your testimony and the Members for their questions. And the record will remain open for two weeks for additional written comments or written questions from Members. And this hearing is now adjourned. [Whereupon, at 11:27 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] Appendix I ---------- Answers to Post-Hearing Questi Answers to Post-Hearing Questions Responses by Dr. Michael Fasolka [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Responses by Mr. Scott A. Kebschull [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Responses by Dr. Alex O. Dehgan [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Responses by Mr. Shawn Springs [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]