Bike helmets are a necessary safety precaution, but they are often bulky and uncomfortable.
That’s why two Swedish women have developed an invisible bike helmet, Jalopnik reports.
The helmet looks like a scarf. It zips on and remains comfortably around the neck until it is needed. If the cyclist wearing scarf is in an accident, the helmet will emerge, covering the cyclist’s head, before impact.
Developers Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin noted that it took them seven years to create the helmet. They worked with a head trauma specialist, looked up reports of bike accidents and compared movement patterns that occur in bicycle accidents to patterns of normal biking.
The result is nothing short of incredible: a scarf that inflates into a helmet when the cyclist needs it.
The idea created Hovding, the airbag for cyclists. Hovding’s website says the helmet “provides the best shock absorption in the world.” It uses sensors to detect changes in the cyclist’s velocity or angle; those changes trigger the helmet to inflate, a process which takes a mere 0.1 seconds.
Check out the video above to see the helmet in action.