cycling science

There’s a fair amount of cycling science research that seems, on the face of it, quite silly. And there’s been a little clutch of such projects published in the last month. Here’s one.

You know when you’ve fallen off your bike, don’t you? Several of your senses tell you irrefutably that you are no longer pedaling upright but are, instead, upside down with your head in a termite nest and your feet in a giraffe’s mouth.

Nevertheless, five Korean engineers, who may be among the small minority of Koreans who have yet to buy the Korean edition of my book, think the human body needs help in identifying when cycling’s gone wrong.

They’ve put a tilt switch and an accelerometer inside their helmets. Whenever they fall off their bikes, the sensors emit a signal. Uncertain as to the significance of these signals, the engineers perfected algorthms to fuse and analyse the data.

Now they are utterly confident that this marvellous technology tells them they have fallen over.  “The algorithm of the third method we developed achieved 100% accuracy in fall direction,” they crow.

Well done, chaps, at last there’s technology to rival the top-tube gadget of the 1980s that told you when you were cycling up hill.

This entry was posted on 05/08/2013 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Helmets, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.