A New Sustainable Soft Body Protector for Increasing Human Safety in Combat Sports: The Case of Taekwondo

Taekwondo is a martial art recognized as an Olympic sport since 2000. During competitions, athletes wear the typical protective garment composed by head, arms, hands, trunk, genitals, legs, foot protectors. The trunk protector has been developed with several modifications during history adding electronic devices to help referees in the points’ assignment. In this paper, some recent technologies adopted in body protectors are analyzed with the purpose of modelling an innovative sustainable soft body protector specific for Taekwondo competitions. The proposed body protector is composed of internal embedded pneumatic devices to increase safety from injuries and reducing transmissibility of a kick or punch on the human’s trunk. Making use of FEM analysis, several geometries of this device are examined to guarantee a high protection level. Some comparison on transmissibility of the impact on the human’s trunk with our solutions and available results in literature of an electronic body protector on market underline the very good results obtained with our proposal. The transmissibility is reduced of 70% using the commercial product and of 30% using our engineering simulation. The excellent results open-up a new sustainable research field in the wearable protection systems. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.