5G Connected Bike Helmets Demonstrate Intelligent Safety

Australian 5G provider Telstra and Sydney-based cycling brand Arenberg are teaming together to create an intelligent safety helmet to protect bikers from dangers in real-time. What is vehicle-to-everything, what has the partnership created, and how does it demonstrate the importance of 5G in the future?

What challenges do cyclists face?

With the average global temperature rising and extreme weather increasing in occurrence, the pressure on the government to introduce green policies continues to grow. While some demands are outright unreasonable with the removal of all fossil fuel cars by 2030, others are far more practical with the desire to increase usage of green transportation and move towards renewable energy.

Pedal bikes are a good alternative to fossil-fuelled vehicles for short distances (say 5 miles), but their use is often impractical for safety reasons. Using a bike on standard city roads is practical where traffic is slow and cycle lanes are plenty, but those living in more rural areas will see high-speed cars and very few cycle lanes.

But it’s not just a lack of cycle lanes that can prove to be dangerous to cyclists; even a stationary vehicle can be a danger. Many car passengers will open their door without checking to see if it is safe to do so, and if a biker hits an opening car door, they can be launched forward resulting in serious injury or death. Interestingly, a method of opening car doors called “The Dutch Reach” can help prevent this as passengers open their door using the hand furthest from the handle. This causes the body to turn around and essentially forces the user to check their blind spots.

Telstra and Arenberg Work to Create Smart 5G Bike Helmets

Recognising the challenges faced by cyclists, cycle brand Arenberg has partnered with Australian cell service provider Telstra to create a new bike helmet with integrated technologies to prevent accidents. Like autonomous cars, the helmet integrates sensors and a camera to scan the surrounding environment for objects and obstacles whose data is then streamed to a cloud-based service. 

Upon detecting objects and other key points of interest, the bike helmet relays this information to the rider in the form of voice commands and warning tones. For example, a passenger opening the door of their car would be detected by the helmet, and this would create an audible warning tone to tell the biker to brake. Audio is transmitted to the wearer with the use of bone-conducting headphones which vibrate the bones of the skull to transmit sound to the ears (this enables a wearer to still hear traffic). 

However, where the new helmet design really changes the game of bike safety is the use of vehicle-to-everything technology. While a camera-based system is great for detecting immediate dangers in front of a rider, it cannot be used to detect vehicles coming around blind junctions. However, vehicle-to-everything connects all devices on the road to a central network whereby all other devices can see each other’s position and velocities. As such, vehicles that are fitted with a compatible vehicle-to-everything system are visible to the helmet. This allows the helmet to warn riders of oncoming vehicles that may not be visible.

The Rising Importance of 5G

The ability to image the surroundings, stream the data to a remote server, process the data, and send back the results is only possible thanks to 5G. While 4G does provide high-speed downloads, it is the low latency of 5G that enables it to process information in real-time especially in applications where each ms can mean the difference of life and death.

5G is still in the process of being rolled out, and vehicle-to-everything is still not supported by most vehicles (old and new). However, the ability to detect oncoming traffic that is not visible could provide a major incentive to roll out such systems especially considering the pointlessness of road deaths. The use of such systems would also take power away from bad drivers and enable others around them to better react to unexpected lane changes, fast driving around junctions, and not stopping at lights.

If cycling can be made safer with the new system developed by Telstra and Arenberg then we may see an increase in bike usage. Furthermore, individuals such as myself who are particularly lazy would take it further and use electric bikes to create a travelling experience that is safe and easy.