Smart Bike HelmetWhat if a bike helmet could warn you about a pothole in the road? What if the airport arrivals-and-departures screens could sell you a Sprite? Then you'd be living in virtual world, where design meets intelligent computing. A research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Selker invented these gadgets, among others, out of a desire to make his life and the environment a little bit smarter.Take the Smart Helmet, a functional headpiece he invented five years ago after reaching a boiling point about inadequate roads and bad drivers in the Boston area. (He commutes by bike from Arlington, Mass., to MIT's campus in Cambridge about three times a week.) Now, the shiny BMX-adapted bike helmet is nearly perfect, he saysWhat can it do? It can play music or audio books, with hook-ups for an iPod or tape cassette. It can record speech through built-in microphones, and GPS (Global Positioning System) warns the
wearer of hazards on a given route. It also can detect important sounds like a fire siren to mute music when necessary. It has a Motorola cell phone with Bluetooth
installed so a
bicyclist can talk on the phone, hands-free.Also, wearers can tip their heads to the left to turn the left-side blinker on at the back of the helmet. Set the helmet down on a kitchen counter and it will turn itself off, thanks to installed motion detectors. If the wearer yells at an unruly motorist, the helmet will activate a horn at a higher decibel than the human noise. "As a bicyclist, people don't like it when I yell," said Selker, a professor of context-aware computing and industrial design intelligence at MIT's Media Lab."One of the problems wearable computers have had in the past is--why would you wear something that would complicate the freewheeling feeling of walking around unencumbered?" The helmet exemplifies Selker's work on gizmos that mediate communication between people and the environment and create a kind of virtual city that enhances the ones we live in. He's working on hundreds of other projects that meld intelligent design with everyday objects or industrial ones.
Looks normalFrom the outside, the Smart Helmet looks normal. It's a black, shiny BMX helmet designed to block wind noise. It has a chin bar with a built-in
microphone near the mouth that muffles external noise, too. Business calls are typically off-limits for Selker, however, because he breathes too heavily while riding.Inside, the helmet has a PIC processor that controls everything from turning blinkers on to recording voice commands. A built-in accelerometer--a device that measures acceleration or the helmet's own motion--detects when the wearer gets bumped or nods his head, which then causes the chip to activate various commands.Selker has built about four versions of the Smart Helmet since 2001, and each time he adds a new idea or function. The downside of the first version, however, was that the software required the computing power of a huge Sony PC, making the helmet too cumbersome.So in the follow-up version, he downsized the code to discern only the volume and pitch of noises, giving the helmet roughly the same functionality as its predecessor. "If it's loud enough, the computer listens to it," he said. Now, the system has a few hundred lines of C programming without an entire PC in the helmet.The newest Smart Helmet, finished this summer, lets the bicyclist shake his head to turn on a microphone, which then records a voice command. For example, if Selker runs into a blind spot at an intersection or a pothole in the road, he can activate the microphone by shaking his head and then say "bad intersection" or "dangerous hole." With GPS technology installed, the helmet will then detect when Selker is traveling near those same spots another day and turn on the recorded audio.
More abstracts about the Smart Bike Helmet