Towards Comfortable Cycling: A Practical Approach to Monitor the Conditions in Cycling Paths

TL;DR

This paper presents a smartphone-based system that passively monitors cycling path conditions in real time, detecting rough surfaces and bumps to enhance cycling safety and comfort.

Contribution

It introduces novel algorithms for real-time detection of road conditions that work regardless of phone orientation and sensor discrepancies.

Findings

Successfully detects rough paths and bumps in real-world cycling routes.

Works with various smartphone orientations and sensor variations.

Proves effective in Singapore cycling paths.

Abstract

This is a no brainer. Using bicycles to commute is the most sustainable form of transport, is the least expensive to use and are pollution-free. Towns and cities have to be made bicycle-friendly to encourage their wide usage. Therefore, cycling paths should be more convenient, comfortable, and safe to ride. This paper investigates a smartphone application, which passively monitors the road conditions during cyclists ride. To overcome the problems of monitoring roads, we present novel algorithms that sense the rough cycling paths and locate road bumps. Each event is detected in real time to improve the user friendliness of the application. Cyclists may keep their smartphones at any random orientation and placement. Moreover, different smartphones sense the same incident dissimilarly and hence report discrepant sensor values. We further address the aforementioned difficulties that limit such crowd-sourcing application. We evaluate our sensing application on cycling paths in Singapore, and show that it can successfully detect such bad road conditions.