Senior Design - Fall 2008 - Group 2

Project Abstract

The Instrumented Football Helmet is a standard football helmet that will be able to measure, record and report on impacts to the head. It will be equiped with a series of accelerometers that will be able to measure the sudden deacceleration of the head during an impact. It will record levels on a removable memory card and will alert sideline personel if any hit is recieved above a threshold. An integrated webserver will allow the sideline personel to adjust recording and notification thresholds at any time.

Project Description

This is a joint project with a student team at Villanova University. We will both be building a helmet with identical parts and featuresets. We will hold several web discussions through out the semester to talk over various aspects of the design.

This project will consist of an actual helmet. We are hoping to be able to use an existing Purdue University football helmet. We will integrate a small circuit board inside the helmet along with 3 accelerometers. These accelerometers will sample acceleration vectors several hundred times a second and alow the micro controller to accurately measure head rotation and acceleration. It will encorporate a memory card reader that will record all impacts above a threshold and a wireless adapter to alert the sideline should a hit be recieved above a higher threshold. An integrated webserver will allow the sideline to access data on the helmet at any time as well as change the recording and alerting thresholds.