The website raises a few red-flags about Hovding for me.

1. It must be charged to operate.

2. It has an on/off button even when charged to ensure it doesn't accidentally inflate when you're putting it on, suggesting this is a problem.

3. Once inflated, it's done. You have to buy a new one. The website suggests your insurance may pay for this, which implies they definitely won't even if it did not inflate in an accident.

This is certainly an interesting concept, but it's expensive, has two additional points of failure vs a helmet (must be both charged and switched on to work), has a high probability of inflating when it shouldn't, and isn't reusable. Technically, most bike and snowsports helmets aren't reusable after an impact either, but you can certainly wipe-out in a way that would trigger the Hovding but wouldn't cause a head-impact, thus wasting the Hovding in an accident a helmet could come through unscathed. I can certainly see why this isn't catching on.

This kind of helmet, with modifications, would be good for back-country skiing, more for avalanche protection than for impact protection. Suffocation is a major cause of death in avalanches. When you are pulled under, snow generally gets everywhere and, once you stop, freezes fairly solid. Even wearing very warm gear you don't have much longer than 15 minutes before hypothermia will kill you (being packed in snow crushes your insulation and greatly increases the rate of thermal conduction to the ice surrounding you), but you can easily suffocate before that. This is why things like avalungs are fairly popular. However, avalungs are basically useless if you aren't very careful about keeping them in mouth-range (if not actually in your mouth) at all times, because you will not think to move it over from its convenient spot on your shoulder when an avalanche is bearing down on you, and you will not be able to grab it from your shoulder once you're immobilized by snow!

An inflatable hood that covers the face during impact and then deflates could automatically produce a bubble of air large enough to keep an avalanche victim from suffocating for 15 minutes, which is hopefully long enough for his AST trained buddies to find and dig him out! There are currently avalanche air-bags on the market which can be user-triggered. These air-bags supposedly help one float on top of an avalanche in addition to providing protection, which is obviously a good thing! However, they must be triggered, and generally don't come over the head. Something that would trigger automatically would be invaluable, although the difficulty of only triggering when appropriate is immense! If hovding's triggering system could work reliably in avalanche conditions it might be worth adding to avalanche air-bag units. I'd love to see radio controlled airbags in addition to automatic and manual controls though. This way, if your buddy is being swept away by an avalanche you might actually be able to trigger his bag even if he doesn't think to. This would be fantastic for heli/cat-ski operators as well.

Avalanche safety is a much higher price-point market than bicycle safety. It's a better target market for bleeding edge tech like hovding. If you could deliver a system that is reliable, even at a price-point in the thousands of dollars, cat/heli-ski operators would go for it immediately.