[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.
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questi
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Dr. Michael Fasolka
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Responses by Mr. Scott A. Kebschull
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Responses by Dr. Alex O. Dehgan
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Responses by Mr. Shawn Springs
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