BrakePack by Artefact
Artefact presents BrakePack, a smart backpack for urban cyclists, designed to save lives.
While biking is considered to be amongst the healthiest and most environment-friendly methods of transportation, it has become fairly risky with an increase in car-related accidents. These accidents often happen at night where car drivers have poor visibility.
While cyclists take a range of precautions to prevent these accidents often these precautions lead to distractions and inconvenience. Hand signals, for instance make cyclists temporarily unstable. The variety of reflectors, such as blinking lights, depreciate the style of the bike and must be removed after each use to avoid being stolen.
Artefact, a Seattle-based company who have made it their mission to improve lives by design, decided to counter these problems through their incubation program, Startefact. The result is the BrakePack, an LED-fitted smart backpack that increases visibility of urban cyclists, removes accessories from the bike, and keeps cyclists’ hands on bars and their eyes on the road.
A user-friendly smartphone app accompanies the bag and automatically sends signals to the backpack via Bluetooth LE based on the destination chosen by the cyclist. This helps the users focus on the road. For example, when the app detects that the cyclist is approaching a right turn, it sends a signal to the backpack to light up a tab on the front straps as well as the rear right signal.
In situations where the cyclist does not have a preset destination in mind, the lights can be activated through a tap on the bag’s shoulder straps. Moreover, the backpack has a built in accelerometer to signal when the biker brakes.
With a design that is focused on safety, style, intelligence and straightforwardness the BrakePack focuses on supporting the biker’s lifestyle and not simply the bike.
At this stage BrakePack is still in prototype stage. Stay tuned to fluoro for further advancements.
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