Lock Your Bike With Your iPhone
Hi fellow Flying Dutchman, good news for us here. A new wheel makes it possible to lock your bike with your iPhone. The Copenhagen Wheel is considered to be one of the most interesting cycling innovations since the invention of the wheel itself.
“The Copenhagen wheel transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. The Copenhagen Wheel allows you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time.”
The whole bike is controlled by the smartphone. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select to what extent the motor assists you. Considering the situation in Amsterdam this is an incredible invention. Imagine locking your bike with an easy finger tip on the touch screen of your iPhone. This sounds like heaven in a city, where we all need three heavy steel locks to secure our bikes… which are extremely unpleasant to touch in this freezing weather.
But there’s more. The Copenhagen Wheel says to provide a complete new metropolitan lifestyle experience even matching with a social networks on the Internet.
“As you cycle, the wheel’s sensing unit is also capturing your effort level and information about your surroundings, including road conditions, carbon monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity. Access this data through your phone or the web and use it to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve your exercise goals or to meet up with friends on the go. You can also share your data with friends, or with your city – anonymously if you wish – thereby contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.”
My bike and my iPhone are the two objects I currently use most in my life. The bike to meet friends, relatives and clients, and the telephone to stay in touch with the same people online. Its great to see both getting compatible now, although I’m doubting the necessity to avoid traffic jams (I’ve never met one for bikes here), or test the humidity level (it always rains). Nevertheless, I think this is a great tool. The Copenhagen Wheel was unveiled yesterday at the United Nations Climate Conference. The project was conceived and developed by MIT’s Senseable City Lab for ‘Kobenhavns Kommune’.
