Safety Support System for Bicycles based on Sensor Network Consisting of Various Sensors

Abstract

In recent years, the number of bicyclists has increased in Japan due to various reasons such as improvement of health awareness and consideration for the natural environment. On the other hand, the number of bicycle-related accidents is decreasing year by year, but the ratio of the accidents is still high (more than 20% of all traffic accidents). Here, the improvement of the bicycle lane has a certain effect on the reduction of the bicycle-related accidents, but it is not realistic to prepare the bicycle lane for all public roads. Therefore, in this study, to achieve the safety of bicycles on the public roads, we propose a safety support system with functions of hazardous location identification, abnormal driving detection, and safe route recommendation. The proposed system detects the hazardous locations where there are steps on the road and many sudden braking/steering occur during the driving by analyzing measurement data collected from acceleration sensors and gyro sensors through the sensor network built on the bicycle. In addition, the proposed system has a function of route recommendation based on the detection results of the hazardous locations. This function can recommend not only the shortest route to the destination but also the safe route where the number of hazardous locations is comparably few among the routes. Furthermore, in this study, we plan to implement a function that detects and notifies users of abnormal behavior through the analysis of heart rate data measured by the wearable device such as a smartwatch.