Feedback on proposed new device [Archive]

The Danimal

March 17th 04, 05:00 AM

(Shotokan) wrote in message >...
> Hi folks,
> I'm an Innovative Product Design student in Dundee Scotland and my
> last brief was to design a short range communication device that works
> over 20m. The user group i have chosen is cyclists and now that the
> project is a few weeks in i would really appreciate some feedback and
> constructive criticism on my idea.
> The idea is that when off-roading in groups and especially at night it
> is difficult to determine where the bulk of the group is going to go.

Route planning can be a non-trivial problem. The usual solution
is for bicyclists to repeatedly ride a limited number of routes,
so they learn to follow those routes. New riders who are
unfamiliar with a route can follow a rider who is familiar,
and keep that rider in sight.

> Also when just joining a group it is daunting to shout for everyone to
> stop when a puncture or similar problem occurs.

Very loud whistles are already on the market. They are light,
cheap, reliable, easy to operate, and can signal a fairly
long way in an emergency. Longer than shouting.

One drawback of a whistle is that the sender and recipient would
need to know Morse code or some other coding scheme to send much
information with a whistle. But generally one blows the whistle to
draw attention, and then people can see if one has stopped and
so on.

> Originally i aimed
> this to only used be accomplished cyclists but further feedback has
> changed this and i now think it would be especially good for children
> groups or family cycling holidays.

Perhaps. If a group is not large, it's easy for two riders to
manage the group by using the leader/sweeper method. The leader
rides at the front to show the way. Members of the group follow
the leader. The sweeper rides at the back and stops to wait
for any group member who falls behind.

With this method, the leader only has to keep track of the sweeper,
for example by checking in his mirror to visually confirm the sweeper
is still in position, and slowing or stopping the group as necessary
to allow the sweeper (and any stragglers) to rejoin.

Essentially the leader uses the sweeper's position to adjust
the group speed from the front. This allows the leader to
modulate the group speed to that of the slowest rider. Or, if
the slowest rider is willing to drop from the group and ride
alone, he tells the sweeper, who signals the leader to maintain
the present speed simply by remaining in position at the back
of the group.

> My proposed solution is a lightweight, handlebar mounted display that
> uses digital compass technology to detect where the group "leader" is
> going and shows this on a LED pointer display.

It might be more useful for the leader to know where the
sweeper is. On a road course this is usually easy if the
sweeper is visible occasionally when the road bends. (The
leader cannot see through following riders when the group
is riding in a straight line, but when the road bends the
appropriate way---to the left in the United States, where we
ride on the right and mount our mirrors on our left---the
back of the group becomes visible. If the sweeper is wearing
distinctively bright clothing the leader easily recognizes
him.)

On a rough off-road course it's questionable whether a
bicyclist bouncing down the trail would be able to see
any sort of bike-mounted graphical display. Especially at
night. It might be necessary to wait until technology is
available to embed a usable heads-up-display into contact
lenses. For hands-free operation the system would need a
robust speech interface or perhaps a direct neural
interface. Check back in the year 2030, perhaps.

For a large group of riders to avoid getting separated on
an off-road course at night, they would all have to be
familiar with the course, or enough of them would have
to be familiar to enable the other riders to follow them.

> A visual alarm is also
> included so that a rider in trouble can quickly alert everyone in the
> group when a problem occurs. I am also thinking of including a lesser
> alarm that notifies the riders behind of obstacles such as fallen
> trees or hairpin bends but i am wary of how much the device will
> weigh.

There are already headset radios on the market allowing
two people to send any message they can express in words.

The type of guidance system you have in mind would be
difficult to make self-contained on just the bikes, using
current technology which is unable to supply much
intelligence. Riders don't have a lot of intelligence to
spare because they must focus on the demanding task of
riding down trails without crashing into trees and boulders.

You could do a lot better by adding some human intelligence
in the form of a dispatcher sitting in a mission control
center. Put a GPS receiver/transponder on every bike, so
the dispatcher could track the locations of all bikes in
real time. The dispatcher could also receive and log
reports of trail conditions as you mentioned above, and
notify following riders through their headset radios
as they approach obstacles.

Obviously this arrangement would be some ridiculous
overkill for a typical recreational ride. However, police
and military organizations use similar methods to coordinate
their field operations. Having the dispatcher adds a lot,
because the dispatcher is free to allocate his/her full
attention to keeping track of the condition of the team
and its environment.

At some point in the future, tiny portable computers may
get smart enough to provide intelligence rivaling
what today requires a human dispatcher in a control center.
Then it may be possible to have a practical, portable system
that can monitor what everybody in a far-flung group is
doing and offer intelligent advice to riders who are straying
off the course or who may be speeding toward dangerous unseen
obstacles.

Essentially you would need a computer smart enough to ride
a bike itself and understand the implications of route conditions
and the group dynamics.

> Some feedback on this idea would be really useful. Thanks in advance

A possibly more useful device would be a way to get complete
weather information along with local storm prediction and warning
when the bicyclist's scheduled path is likely to intersect with
a storm path. If the device could suggest alternate routings
around storms that could be useful. Where I live (southwestern
Ohio in the United States), every summer we have numerous
pop-up thunderstorms. Real-time weather radar maps are available
on the Web but as soon as I get on my bike I'm limited to what
I can see by looking at the sky, and by two or three hours
into a ride the weather can be very different. Often my view
of the sky is obscured by trees and hills, and even under
the best conditions I have trouble judging the size of an
approaching storm and seeing it soon enough to change my
route to dodge it.

A PDA with Web access and GPS could allow for some interesting
integration of routing and weather information.

You might look into the routing problem. Most off-the-shelf
route planning tools are not optimal for bicyclists, who
tend to choose different routes than automobile drivers.
Since bicyclists tend to ride particular routes repeatedly,
the first thing to include is a completely simple way to
generate route plans just by riding the routes. (This is
possible already with some GPS receivers.) It would
also be nice to have a completely simple method to automatically
integrate actual route information from many riders in one
central location. That way, over time, you could build up a
database of bicycle-appropriate routes with enough coverage to
be useful to a large percentage of future customers.

-- Daniel Mocsny