Green Wheel

Smart mobility & ubiquitous computing scenarios

Scenarios & future casting, Mobility, Ubiquitous Computing
Boston (US) / MIT, April 2009

The Green Wheel is a combination of bike hardware and mobile device software, integrated to make a new platform to provide innovative sustainable mobility services. Developed by the Smart Cities group at the Media Lab, MIT Mobile Experience Lab envisioned ubiquitous computing and smart mobility solutions for Green Wheel bikes that can serve as a base technology to enable a number of different scenarios, such as power micro-generation, distributed urban sensing, virtual rack bike-allocation, and peer-to-peer shipping.

Brief / Concept

The Green Wheel hardware is a self-contained unit that includes an electric motor and battery, along with a generator that can recharge the battery. With a wireless-operated throttle, the generator can release energy stored while pedaling / braking to support the ride during more difficult stretches. While the concept of bikes that can recycle their own energy and even make small contributions to the grid provides numerous opportunities, the Green Wheel project is not limited to power micro-generation. The Mobile Experience Lab combined the hardware with innovative software and electronics to create a new platform for sustainable mobility and to envision for the GreenWheel bicycle future scenarios in the Ubiquitous Computing area.

Design Process

The scenarios are the result of an extensive concept generation process to design applications to be embedded in the GreenWheel. In particular, the emerging concepts were clustered in categories such as: Distributed Data Sensing (private or shared bicycles can actively participate in a real-time representation of urban & environmental conditions), Citizens' Watch (active civic engagement), Asynchronous Urban Competitions (Personal Trainer application and Urban races), Peer-to-Peer Freight (shipments modalities to be carried out by peers to increase the service time/cost efficiency and sustainability in urban contexts), Dynamic Routing - Bike Sharing (application to dynamically allocate the bikes participating to a public sharing program in the city), Health navigation (real-time environmental data collected by bikes are aggregated and used to suggest health itineraries for people suffering of asthma disease), Cultural trip (Bike as a touristic guide), Family trip (an application to increase the safety of kids during family trips), Visualization / Advertisement (usage of dynamic-message LEDs that take advantage of the Persistence of Vision to display short messages).