POC products intended to prevent head and back injury for skiers{mosimage}Until now it has mainly been children, extreme skiers and competition skiers who have used helmets and back protection. But the advance of ski sport in relation to man’s unchanged vulnerability, together with proposed EU legislation, means that the use of protection is now an urgent consideration for the general mass of skiers too.

The success of modern carving skis means that average speeds on the slopes have increased by up to 30%. Together with the fact that skiers make much wider turns with these skis, this has led to far more crashes and accidents than ever before something that the ski business has chosen to keep quiet about. Until recent years safety in skiing has been largely neglected. There has been some focus on avalanches, of course, and on general safety structures during racing. But when it comes to personal protection gear, advance has been halting. One reason is that because of lack of demand and therefore lack of competition among suppliers, protection gear has so far not been developed to the same degree as other ski equipment.

Change is now coming. The market for personal protection is growing rapidly all over the world. Italy has for instance legislated on compulsory helmet use for children up to 14 years old. Now voices are being raised in favor of legislating for the increased use of helmets throughout the EU which will naturally only achieve the intended effect if helmets really
do provide proper protection: an important proviso.

Avoiding brain and spinal injuries

To quote PHGhatan, MD, PhD of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute, and a board member of POC Lab: ‘Research shows that serious head injuries could be reduced by 60-80% through the use of helmets. It is extremely important that the technical performance of the protection should continue to match requirements as the sport develops, and should also take account of human vulnerabilities. We must always take supreme care of our highly developed brain. It is the most advanced biological system that we know of and is an extremely sensitive organ a feature that is crucial for our intelligence and our consciousness. At the same time this very feature can easily be damaged in an accident. It is important that all of us should appreciate these basic facts and should understand the enormous consequences that a brain injury can have for ourselves and our families.’

POC is a brand new Swedish company in the area of high-performance helmets and body armor for alpine skiers. ‘It is our mission to do everything we can to develop protective gear that can save lives and reduce the severity of injuries’, says Stefan Ytterborn, founder and CEO of POC.

To succeed in this aim, POC has collaborated with top experts in the areas of medicine, technology, construction, materials, design and skiing. POC’s challenge is to dramatically improve the degree of protection delivered by protective products. Factors to be considered include impact-resistance, penetration-resistance, energy-absorption and cut-resistance, together with the location and weight of the protection, which must not challenge comfort and mobility. But as POC’s Chief Industrial Designer Jan Woxing says: ‘We are getting there’.

Two of the highlights of POC´s range are the Skull helmet and the company’s back-protection system (patents pending).

The Skull helmet is developed from a concept to provide five major advantages:

· Less bouncing off the ground in a fall (saving the neck and the brain)
· Higher penetration-resistance
· Better energy-absorption properties
· Better fit
· Lower weight

The back-protection system protects parts of the spine that have been neglected until now. Because of the competition rules of the FIS the sport’s governing body the upper (cervical) part of the spine has remained unprotected. This is in fact the most vital part to protect a matter of survival. Another area which is not quite as vital, but still important to protect, is the bottom (coccyx) part. This too is well-protected.