Safer paths to green mobility? Reimagining cycle safety at Imperial College's DE10 Hackathon

CycleGuard is a concept for a bicycle accessory that allows riders to bike confidently in the presence of nearby vehicles. It uses proximity sensors to detect when a car might be getting too close, alerting both the cyclist and the driver using haptics and light.

On September 21st, 2024, the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London celebrated its 10th anniversary with a hackathon, inviting current and former students to create innovative concepts in well-being, healthcare, sustainability, and education—all within a fast-paced 6-hour time window.

Together with my teammates David Cai, Etienne Naude, and Meigan Teo (all of whom are also former work colleagues at KAIKAKU AI), we decided to tackle the problem of bicycle safety in heavily urbanized environments like London.

In London, cyclists can account for up to 40% of its road traffic at peak times (myself contributing to this!). This trend has been rising over the past couple of decades and it is now above pre-pandemic levels. In many regards, this is great news for everyone — it reduces the city's overall carbon footprint, makes traffic flow more fluid, and promotes a healthier lifestyle for its citizens. However, cyclists often face risks, instead of rewards, for their contribution to a healthier, more sustainable city: in the first 7 months of 2022, almost 3,000 people were killed or seriously injured in a traffic accident while cycling in London. Although this number has decreased from a decade ago, cyclists and other two-wheel riders still make up for most fatalities in this city, according to the latest TfL report.

CycleGuard | Our concept proposal:

Looking into these fatalities, we see that most of them occur in collisions with other road vehicles, most often when either the car driver or the cyclist fails to look properly or gets distracted by something else in their field of view.

In response to this, our Hackathon team came up with CycleGuard, a bicycle add-on to be placed on each side of the bike's handlebar, designed to bring cyclists to the attention of nearby car drivers, by displaying a powerful, red-blinking signal from a diffused laser screen when drivers get too close to the bike. What's more: it also informs the cyclist that a car is close and on which side using haptics, so they can be aware of the situation without having to turn their heads and becoming distracted.

To demonstrate CycleGuard in this one-day hackathon, we quickly put together the following functional prototype and provided a live demo:

Functional prototype of CycleGuard, developed for the DE10 Hackathon.

As we began to build CycleGuard, we realized we could take advantage of its sensors to expand cycling safety and well-being into another context: unobtrusive navigation. Many cyclists use their phones to know their way through the city as they ride. This, of course, can be a source of visual distractions, even when the phone is docked on the handlebar. To provide sight-free navigation, Etienne Naude developed a fully functional web application that connects to CycleGuard wirelessly. With this app, riders can set up their route on their smartphone before the trip starts, and CycleGuard will then guide them with haptic feedback, alerting them when to turn left or right—and thus eliminating the need to look at a screen. The application's source code can be found here!

For future releases, this application could also be used to sync with CycleGuard and provide analytics regarding near-misses, falls, and accidents. This could potentially be used to alert riders of particularly dangerous areas to cycle! All-in-all, there is still a long way to go to reduce cycling accidents in urban environments, but this is certainly one of the areas in which technology can help us build a better future ✨.

DE10 Hackathon Team behind the development of CycleGuard (left to right: Gonzalo Morales, Etienne Naude, Meigan Teo, David Cai). Watch a recap video of the Hackathon event here!