Smart cars, smart helmets

Up to 3,000 cyclists die every year in the European Union. In the United States, there may be as many as 50,000 accidents that injure or kill bicyclists annually.

But what if there were a bike helmet that alerts drivers to your presence? Swedish automobile manufacturer Volvo has been working on technology to connect cycling helmets with cars on the cloud. It's being unveiled this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. DW talked to Volvo group CIO Klas Bendrik about the new helmet - including some potential pitfalls.

DW: How does this system work?

Klas Bendrik: We're using technology, the Volvo cloud, Bluetooth, smart phones and the Strava app. In that ecosystem, we are then connecting the helmets to provide information - in this case light and sound information and vibrations - to the road users.

What kind of proximity do you have to get into before an alert shows up?

That is one of those things we are now investigating and calibrating as we proceed into the concept and the further pilot test.

What if I'm riding my bike in the city … will I be getting an alert for every car that passes within a close distance? All of these alerts could be distracting. If my helmet starts to flash and I get distracted by that, I might run into something. Is that a consideration?

It's absolutely a consideration. As you say, in an urban environment, with many cars and many other road users, there will be a lot of information that will be communicated. This is also why we would like to use our connected vehicle cloud, in order to calibrate which type of messages need to be sent when. Of course you need to communicate relevant information when you need it, not at all times.

There's also the question, especially in Europe and Germany, of privacy and data security. People don't like to be tracked. Is this something you're also considering?

If you look at Volvo cars, one of our core statements is about safety. And safety is equally important to us when it comes to virtual safety and in this case privacy. All the data that is generated from a Volvo or from a customer of Volvo is owned by the customers themselves. And it needs an active decision and acknowledgement if that data is going to be used somewhere else.

We've seen the ongoing trend toward the Internet of Things, with the smart connection between objects, between people. Is this another step in that development?

Initial development was about making the car safe for the passengers in the vehicles. The next step of development was very much active safety solutions, in order to assist the driver to have the car do a full auto-brake, for example. Now we're taking this domain even further into connected safety, where we use the solutions around connectivity and the Internet of things in order to protect the unprotected, so to speak.

You mentioned auto-brake - how would that work?

It will be provided with city safety as a standard. It will have full auto-brake towards a biker if a collision is imminent.

So for example if I'm riding my bicycle down the road and it seems the driver is about to hit me, then the car itself will actually slam the brakes and prevent a collision?

Correct. One way of explaining it is that the radars and the cameras keep an eye on the various objects. And if there is an imminent collision that the system discovers the driver will not act upon, then the car can move on to a full auto-brake in order to protect both pedestrians as well as bikers.

Is it a proprietary solution?

At this point in time, yes. We are developing the world's first technology that actually connects cars with other road users, in this case bikes. We are working on this together with Ericsson, which is providing our connected cloud and with POC, a sports gear manufacturer out of Sweden.

Have there been any thoughts about moving toward an open-source system for this technology?

This concept of connected safety and proximity alerts for road users is so interesting that we would like to proceed in developing these concepts and pilots further before actually trying to set the standard on a regional, national or global scale. Moving down into the future, I can clearly see a development where this will become, one way or the other, much more broadly available. How that will develop will be an interesting journey to follow.

Volvo plans to pilot the system this coming spring.

Klas Bendrik is Volvo Group's Chief Information Officer.