This genius helmet sticker helps protect athletes’ brains

In late February, 32 of the world’s best snowboarders gathered at Buttermilk Ski Resort—a so-called “mountain playground” in Aspen, Colorado—to go head-to-head in a high-stakes halfpipe competition. While most spectators were focused on their physical skills, eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed that three of the athletes were wearing identical stickers on their helmets. These stickers weren’t just ornamental: contained inside the small patches is a prospective technology that could have ripple effects across the broader sports world. 

The snowboarders (most of which arrived fresh off the Olympics) were competing in an event hosted by The Snow League, the first professional winter sports league dedicated to snowboarding and freeskiing. Founded by five-time Olympian Shaun White in 2024, this new league gives athletes access to a year-round, global competition where they can display their skills. On February 27 and 28, it also served as a testing ground for a new technology called the Crash Patch.

Developed by the health company Klick Health in collaboration with The Snow League, the Crash Patch is a first-of-its-kind helmet sticker that’s designed to alert athletes if they’ve taken a major blow to the head. Previously, this kind of shock-detection capability has mainly been incorporated directly into high-tech helmet designs for football teams, making them expensive and difficult to access for most athletes. 

This sticker concept—which is not yet commercially available—could eventually make head impact detection accessible and intuitive for athletes in any helmet-based sport, at any level.

A design for an ‘urgent need’

The concept for the Crash Patch started with Kate Maldjian, an associate creative director at Klick Health who skateboards in her free time. “When I’m skateboarding, I fall all the time,” Maldjian says. “I’m wearing a helmet, but sometimes I don’t know how heavy the impact is.” 

That’s a common issue for many athletes: Neurologists say that an impact to the head at 75 times the force of gravity, or 75G, is a high-risk threshold that may result in a concussion. Many athletes can sustain such a blow without realizing its severity, or experience delayed symptoms that don’t emerge until hours later. Maldjian and her colleague, fellow Klick Health associate creative director Dan Macena, came up with a design-focused solution to this problem.

Devices that measure sports-based blunt force trauma to the head aren’t new. Scientists have been working on similar projects for more than a decade, including multiple companies that have created shock-detecting helmets for football players.

Unfortunately, broad adoption of these kinds of tools has faltered. In 2016, the NFL suspended a program that would’ve required athletes to wear helmets with sensors measuring head hits after a wave of player privacy concerns. Many of the current options on the market require a Bluetooth connection or a coach monitoring outputs from the sidelines.

One start-up, called NoMo Diagnostics, was working on a helmet that could track brainwave activity to detect concussions before it ultimately shut down around 2024. Before the company shuttered, it told CBS News that it expected one helmet to cost $400.

“There are pretty expensive tools out there, like those helmets,” Macena says. “But in the case of action sports, we just felt like the urgent need was there. There’s a lot of kids that are out there playing these sports on their own. They’re unsupervised. They don’t have the benefit of either that money or that equipment or those teams to watch them and figure out whether that impact was more serious than the last one. We wanted to create a low cost, lower barrier to entry tool that a student or an athlete could use without any excuse not to.”

How the crash patch works

The Crash Patch is decidedly more lo-fi than other impact detection tools on the market, utilizing an analog system to detect shock rather than a digital one. The concept of infusing shock-detection tech into a helmet sticker came from an observation from Maldjian and Macena: Athletes, like snowboarders, skiers, and skateboarders, are already accessorizing their helmets with stickers. By incorporating the tech into this format, they realized they could make it easy to use and even desirable to younger athletes.

Once they’d landed on a sticker format, next came the unique challenge of finding a way to measure impact using such a small device. The tech would need to be tiny, but also cheap to manufacture in order to maintain a low cost, eliminating anything that might require sensors or a Bluetooth connection.

Maldjian and Macena’s solution was to rely on something called an impact indicator, which is typically used in industrial or shipping settings to protect fragile packages. The indicator is composed of two vials, one of which is sandwiched into the other like a Russian doll. When the indicator is hit with a certain amount of force—in this case, about 75G or more—the interior vial breaks, releasing a pigment that changes the visual reading from clear to red. Because it relies on a physical reaction, the Crash Patch doesn’t need to be charged or connected to another system.

In order to react reliably, the Crash Patch needs to be placed on top of the helmet to detect impacts from all sides. According to Rich Levy, Klick Health’s chief creative officer, the patch has worked consistently under these conditions in testing. Each patch can only be used until it turns red, at which point the athlete needs to replace it with a new patch.

Given that it can’t actually measure concussions or other injuries, Maldjian and Macena say the Crash Patch isn’t considered a medical device, but rather a method of alerting athletes when they should pay attention.

“We’re just saying, ‘That hit was really heavy, you should pay attention to it—you should not overlook it,’” Macena says. “A lot of response from people on the mountain was, ‘I don’t know how bad that was,’ and that’s the answer we’re trying to figure out.”

What’s next

Right now, the Crash Patch is still in the early development phase, though Klick Health is actively working toward future commercialization for all types of helmet-based sports. The team says it’s uncertain how much each Crash Patch might cost—though, given the low manufacturing investment for the actual components, they expect it to be significantly cheaper than any of the alternatives on the market. 

Levy says the stickers saw major demand at the February Snow League event, where his team was passing out prototypes to spectators. “We could’ve had 10 times the number that we brought, because everyone wanted them, and they wanted multiples,” he says. The concept was popular among both parents and kids (some of whom even came back for a replacement after their sticker turned red), as well as athletes from other disciplines like mountain biking. 

We had a couple people come back and kind of give us that really positive feedback of, ‘I’m so glad I had this on my helmet,’” Macena says. “And there was lots of interest from all age groups. We got the kids, they just wanted a sticker. We got the parents, they were like, ‘What’s that on the sticker?’ We got people who had been on the mountain for decades and were really interested because they’ve seen it all.”

Ultimately, he adds, he hopes the Crash Patch will help athletes realize that even small head impacts “can add up”—and equip them with the tools to stop, take notice, and slow down.