Inspired by Tragedy, Barrington Girl Improves Bike Helmet Safety

Sarah Finnerty of Barrington is an eighth-grader at Bay View Academy whose project, “Can We Build a Safer Bike Helmet?,” was recently awarded one of two Junior Division “Best in Fair” titles at the Rhode Island Science and Engineering Fair (RISEF).

That’s an impressive accomplishment on its own but add to it the fact that her project was, as she puts it, “emotionally charged,” and it becomes even more notable

Sarah’s family knows firsthand the damaging effects of a bike helmet that doesn’t do its job. In the spring of 2010, Sarah’s father was involved in a tragic biking accident that left him with a severe head injury.

Sarah and her parents moved from New York to Rhode Island after 9/11. She was just two and a half years old when the attack on the World Trade Center occurred, her father serving as a first responder with the FDNY.

“He survived 9/11, but. . .” said Sarah, her pause indicative of the cruel twist of fate that he made it through a devastatingly, disastrous event only to suffer life altering injuries from something as ordinary as riding a bike.

Sarah has managed to turn the negative into a positive; she has an idea to improve bike helmets.

One of the doctors treating her Dad after his accident made a point that really stuck with Sarah. He said that her father’s injuries were in large part due to the construction of bike helmets, noting that helmets aren’t always effective because they are made with hard exteriors instead of soft.

Sarah explains, “When you hit your head on a hard surface it hurts because the hard surface sends all of the impact right back to you but the soft surface absorbs all the impact like a pillow.”

This was the hypothesis behind Sarah’s science experiment. To test it, she designed three miniature model helmets to three different standards, two to her standards with a soft exterior and the third built to existing factory standards with a hard exterior.

She performed various impact tests on the helmet, using eggs to simulate a head. The results?

“My outcome was that my model helmets did the best and model three was totally obliterated and I had a big mess to clean up,” she said.

In short, she determined her hypothesis, that the soft exterior helmet is more effective at preventing injury than the hard, was correct.

In addition to the Best in Fair award, Sarah won a Society of Women Engineers award, a citation from Sen. Jack Reed and an invitation to participate in the Society for Science’s Broadcom MASTERS contest. She also caught the attention of Rep. David Cicilline, who interviewed her on the floor of the fair and posted the video to his twitter feed. (http://telly.com/8L5LZM)

Of Sarah’s project and success, Bay View Lower and Middle School Principal, Cynthia Lorincz, says, “We’re very proud of Sarah. She used her life experience and her love of science to create a practical solution to a very real problem. It’s a wonderful example of the good that comes from pairing science with concern for others.”

--Lia Del Sesto McAlpine