Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

With autumn upon us and winter beginning its descent, let's strike up the Anvil Chorus in honor of all the craniums that, like so many precious and unique hammers, will soon hit something really hard really fast.

Watch as the courageous year-round cyclist hits a schmear of slimy leaves, gets waylaid by some black ice, or bunny-hops into a wet trolley track. Oof! Observe the coon-eyed mountain Chad as he strays into a feral pack of heedless snowboarders, gets cocky on some double-black vertical, or yard-sales after hucking off a sweet jump. Pow!

Good thing they're wearing helmets. But if that's you lying there in your snazzy helmet, what if you still don't wake up? Get KO'd or suffer a serious outage and you'll most likely lie there and collect angel tears – unless you were smart and/or paranoid enough to drop 150 beans on an ICEdot Crash Sensor.

This miniature brain is roughly the size of a soft drink bottlecap. It attaches to any helmet – clipped into a vent, as pictured, or stuck on with a super-sticker – and registers impacts via both a three-axis gyroscope and a three-axis accelerometer. A proprietary algorithm determines whether the hit exceeds brain-trauma threshold. If there's cause for worry, the ICEdot alerts your phone over low-energy Bluetooth. This triggers the ICEdot app to sound an alarm and begin a countdown. If you don't wake up and turn it off before it times out, the app texts your GPS coordinates to your emergency contacts.

Sound complicated? It is, but not for the user. Setup is simple and fast: Register online, download the app, connect with the sensor, and you're done. ICEdot includes stickers (and sells an optional wristband) that can link EMTs and any other good Samaritans to your profile. Right now, the ICEdot app is available only for iPhone 4s and 5, but an Android 4.3 version is in the works.