Title: Towards Comfortable Cycling: A Practical Approach to Monitor the Conditions in Cycling Paths,
Abstract: This is a no brainer. Using bicycles to commute is the most sustainable form
of transport, is the least expensive to use and are pollution-free. Towns and
cities have to be made bicycle-friendly to encourage their wide usage.
Therefore, cycling paths should be more convenient, comfortable, and safe to
ride. This paper investigates a smartphone application, which passively
monitors the road conditions during cyclists ride. To overcome the problems of
monitoring roads, we present novel algorithms that sense the rough cycling
paths and locate road bumps. Each event is detected in real time to improve the
user friendliness of the application. Cyclists may keep their smartphones at
any random orientation and placement. Moreover, different smartphones sense the
same incident dissimilarly and hence report discrepant sensor values. We
further address the aforementioned difficulties that limit such crowd-sourcing
application. We evaluate our sensing application on cycling paths in Singapore,
and show that it can successfully detect such bad road conditions.