Since 2022, the new ECE R22-06 motorcycle helmets standard has been put into effect. The authors suggested to investigate the contribution of this new standard to the evolution of th protective performance of helmets. The present paper proposes a comparative evaluation of helmets complying to the 06 and 05 version of the ECE R22 regulation in terms of global head injury metrics as well as model-based brain injury risk under both, linear and oblique impact conditions based on the certimoov method.

With 47 helmet models complying to R22-05 and 16 helmet models fulfilling R22-06, the 63 helmets models were evaluated according to the Certimoov testing methodology consisting in 18 impact tests on 6 samples. A total of 1,134 experimental impacts were conducted. Results indicate marginal decreases in kinematics parameters with R22-06 conforming helmets. Considering the mean brain injury risk, the results show very little improvement. The larger improvement can be observed under ZROT impacts which however are not considered in this new standard. All the results are marred by a large disparity and a significant standard deviation. Thus, the authors conclude that the ECE R22-05 helmets do not look significantly different from R22-06 helmets in terms of head protection.

This research provides insight into the effect of the new standard on head protection, highlighting almost no improvement in performance, particularly under oblique impacts introduced by R22-06.