As bicycle sharing becomes a popular solution for city dwellers, some researchers are seeing an opportunity to create decentralized networks of mobile sensors.
Several bike-sharing companies have started to equip their vehicles with detectors that collect information about environmental and geospatial conditions, which urban planners can use to improve city infrastructure and other community development projects.
To harness the potential of these new data streams, Andres Rico and his colleagues at the MIT have designed a mobile platform for electric-assist bicycles that incorporates a camera, a GPS module, and multiple environmental sensors.
Data collected by each part of the system are combined to give a holistic description of a given bike trip and a better understanding of the rider’s relationship with the bike and the immediate environment.
This, in turn, leads to deeper understanding of the urban surroundings. For instance, it can identify commuter route preferences that may indicate riders’ perceptions of safety in their community.
To create a more user-friendly space, Elena Kodama and her MIT colleagues developed a dynamic system that senses occupants’ activity and accordingly generates a separately controlled light for each person in a room.
By implementing several advanced control features for programmable light fixtures, the MIT team developed a prototype that compares real-time user position data to the lighting locations.