In many activities that people participate in, participants are required to wear head protection. By way of non-limiting example, many skiers, snowboarders, cyclists, football players, hockey players, and motorcyclists are required to wear helmets that may have visors.
Various prior art systems exist for providing athletes taking part in sports or other physical activities with information regarding their performance. Many current solutions such as handheld GPS devices, performance measurement units, wristwatches, and mobile phones may require the user to stop and/or remove gloves or other clothing, in order to extract the device and look at the information. This can create discomfort, waste time, cause delay and may furthermore be prone to inaccurate measurements.
Many existing electronic performance measurement devices use GPS techniques and require sensor modules mounted at various parts of the user's body. Some existing GPS based devices have the following limitations: the GPS data is prone to atmospheric delay errors; and while the GPS based position errors are generally bounded, the GPS signal can be lost when the corresponding satellites are geometrically inaccessible. Much of the available equipment includes one or more sensors attached to the limbs or equipment of the user that use wireless communication to the main unit. This can make it inconvenient to use and prone to data errors due to interference and signal attenuation. Furthermore, the output displays of current technologies are often inconvenient to access and lack user friendly interfaces.
Patents and published applications relating to methods and systems for providing users with performance information include International Patent Application Publication No. WO 2008/027415 to Orth et al., United States Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0287596 to Case, Jr. et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,255,437 to Howell et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,092,846 to Vock et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,924,764 to Chen, U.S. Pat. No. 6,441,846 to Carlbom et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,162,828 to Furness et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,757,714 to Purdy et al., United States Patent Application Publication No. 2004/0125047 to Crane et al., German Patent DE10307324 to Herms, German patent DE10234333A to Schimpf, United States Patent Application Publication No. 2012/0002046 to Rapoport et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,266,930 to Ichikawa et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,856,811 to Shih et al., United States Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0122958 to Olita et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,460,304 to Epstein et al., United States Patent Application Publication No. 2001/0049837 to Slack et al., United States Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0035626 to Randall at al., United States Patent Application Publication No. 2009/0040296 to Moscato et al., United States Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0048286 to Donato et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,691,325 to Pelletier et al.
Improvements in helmets that provide information to wearers of such helmets are desirable.