Video: An invisible cycle helmet with airbag wins design award in Copenhagen

Ahh yes, I love wear­ing blaz­ers stuffed with yel­low hand­ker­chiefs and styl­ish neck-braces that are actu­ally hel­mets in dis­guise and look­ing forever-confused.

What hap­pens when two Swedish women start a joint effort on their master-thesis with the inten­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the hel­met?  Amaz­ing stuff!

They inter­viewed cyclists to find out what keeps them from wear­ing one and over­all peo­ple thought they looked silly and didn’t like how it messed with their hair.

So they set out to design an invis­i­ble hel­met, that actu­ally looks like a scarf, called a Hövd­ing, that opens up an airbag in case there’s an impact to pro­tect your beau­ti­ful, pre­cious brain.

It has accelerom­e­ters and gyros that are pro­grammed to detect falls or abrupt hits. They pro­grammed it to detect vir­tu­ally any­time of col­li­sion that is pos­si­ble.  It even has a “black box” that has the last 10 sec­onds of data saved if it ever deploys so that all the move­ments of the cyclist are recorded in case of an accident.

They were the win­ners of the 2011 Index design awards where they were pre­sented with the high­est engineering-design-award of 100,000 Euros at a gala in the Dan­ish cap­i­tal of Copenhagen.