If makers of the new protective baseball hat designed by isoBLOX intend for their product to catch on, they may want to cite recent concussion research from Virginia Tech, where a group of researchers authored the first concussion study proving the effectiveness of helmet design while taking into account the different number of hits each player receives.

"So you don't necessarily know if you're comparing a player who is impacted infrequently in one helmet type, versus one player who is not impacted as much," Steven Rowson, the study's lead author and a biomedical engineer at the Virgnia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, told the Los Angeles Times. "You might have a linebacker being compared to a kicker."

Rowson and his team were able to track the head motion changes of over 1 million hits in every game played by eight NCAA Division I programs spanning five years, according to the LA Times. They compared two helmets -- both made by Riddell (and also used in the NFL) - the older VSR4 design, discontinued in 2011, and the most recent Revolution line, started in 2002. Overall, three percent of players studied sustained a concussion, but those wearing the revolution line were 54 percent less likely to do so.

For better or worse, college and professional football represents the best opportunity to study concussions, as Rowson pointed out to the LA Times.

"It's really hard to study a brain injury in a living human," he said. "You can't take someone in a lab, hit him in the head and see what the clinical outcome is for a certain impact. But the football players, they hit their heads every day voluntarily. So the idea of the research is to instrument that population and observe it over time so you can collect data in a natural and ethical manner."

According to the LA Times, Peyton Manning was one of the first to adapt Riddell's new model when it debuted in 2002.