Development and Application of Instrumented Bicycle and Its Sensing Technology in Condition Assessments for Bike Trails

Abstract

The paper introduces the development of an instrumented bicycle and its sensing technology and presents a mobile app named Instrumented Bike and a Google Cloud website to demonstrate how the instrumented bicycle advances cycling activities in detecting potential hazards and displays the locations of georeferenced points on bike routes. The instrumented bicycle senses road conditions through the sensor logger along with the mobile app and cloud server. The sensor logger consists of a microprocessor, accelerometers, a Global Positioning System (GPS) unit, battery, computer board (Arduino board), and Wi-Fi device paired with a smartphone via the Instrumented Bike mobile app. All real-time data is immediately transferred to the mobile app and the cloud server, where all data is analyzed using a data processing technique (the window interpolation method). Potential hazards (such as potholes, severe cracks, and bumps) are identified, georeferenced, and displayed in Google Maps to allow bicyclists (road users) and governments/authorities (road managers) to review prior to their cycling or decision-making for day-to-day maintenance. The paper concludes that the instrumented bicycle and its sensing technology presented in the paper allows cycling activities to effectively and immediately reflect and communicate the real-time road conditions to the bicyclists/governments who share/manage the bike routes, market and promote bike mobility, and recruit more participants in cycling data collection.