SmartBike: A Low-Power Edge IoT System for Cycling Safety and Real-Time Awareness

Abstract

Urban cycling is a sustainable mode of transportation, but cyclists remain highly vulnerable in dense traffic because of limited situational awareness and the lack of active safety assistance on conventional bicycles. This paper presents SmartBike, a low power Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform for cyclist safety, combining blind spot monitoring, rider usage detection, localization, and wireless edge-to-gateway communication. The proposed system consists of a bike-mounted IoT node and a gateway assisted monitoring interface. The node integrates three time-of-flight sensors for blind spot detection, an IMU module for motion sensing and on-board speed estimation, a GNSS module for localization, and a saddle mounted piezo-electric transducer for event-driven wake up. To satisfy the energy constraints of the IoT node, the design employs piezo-triggered activation, application specific sensing rates, and compact connectionless Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertisements for low overhead transmission. The firmware is implemented in Zephyr RTOS using a lightweight state machine architecture, while the gateway performs passive BLE scanning, payload decoding, and real-time dashboard visualization. The BLE payload is reduced to 11 bytes, and power analysis shows that sensing accounts for more than 90% of the total energy budget, while wireless communication represents less overall consumption. With a 12600 mWh battery, the estimated lifetime reaches approximately 21 months under typical commuting conditions (Average 40 min per day).