A Vancouver startup's segment-and-detach foam took the safest-bike-helmet crown

Bike helmets have long been judged on direct impacts, and the US CPSC still tests only those, even though research shows the danger is how violently the head twists. The industry moved anyway: MIPS brought a low-friction sliding layer to market in 2007, and in 2018 Virginia Tech launched its STAR ratings, testing helmets beyond the legal minimum for linear and rotational impact. The ranking turned safety into a competition — by 2025, 167 of 272 helmets earned five stars and Virginia Tech had to tighten its grading, because hitting number one had become good for business.

Sitting ahead of all of them is the Pikio Si Oblik road helmet from Vancouver startup Pikio Labs, with a STAR score of 4.61 — where lower is better and 10.1 or lower earns five stars. That is 2.21 points, about 32 percent, below the previous best (Canyon's Deflectr at 6.82), a massive shift when most top-rated helmets score between 7 and 10. Founder Daniel Abram brings 18 years of helmet research: after mechanical engineering he worked on the BrainShield rotational-protection system at Simon Fraser University, then founded BiaGuard, whose patents MIPS bought for around $1 million in 2022.

Oblik's idea is structural: instead of one continuous block of EPS foam, the liner is broken into independently mounted sections joined by flexible connection points, with dual-density foam underneath. As Abram puts it, rather than compressing material in one direction, the system deforms, deflects and detaches depending on the impact's intensity, location and direction, managing linear and rotational energy in the same structure. The cost of that complexity is real — about 80 components versus a standard helmet's 8 to 10, and a $379 price, $219 above the second-best Canyon.

Break the helmet's foam block into independently mounted sections that deform, deflect or detach, so impact energy stops reaching the skull as a twist.

The official CPSC standard still measures only direct impacts, so third-party STAR ratings became the scoreboard that actually rewards rotational protection.

Existing systems bolt rotation management on top — MIPS slides a layer, Canyon's RLS floats external panels on ball bearings — while Oblik rebuilds the liner itself as movable sections.

Sections that can detach let a severe impact spend energy in the helmet's structure instead of in the skull.

Pikio pays owners a 30 percent replacement discount if it gets the crashed helmet back, turning customers into a real-world crash-data pipeline.

When the official standard lags the science, a public third-party scoreboard can do the regulating — and winning it with one structural idea beats iterating on the incumbent layer.

The Pikio Si Oblik tops Virginia Tech's STAR rankings at 4.61, with MIPS, WaveCel, 6D and Canyon's RLS still competing on rival approaches. Four crashed helmets have been returned and replaced so far; Abram says each did its job and kept the rider safe, and every returned shell is a free real-world data point.