Safety for bike sharesIn 2011, bike share systems in Boston exploded in popularity. Riders on the "Hubway" bikes all throughout town. Many tragic bicycle fatalities occur in Boston annually, however, that could have been prevented by helmet use, and the existing system offered no helmet solution for its riders.
In my senior year at MIT, a team of fellow dedicated product design students in my 2.009 class and I designed, fabricated, and eventually started a business around a device to solve the helmet problem. HelmetHub provides bicycle helmet vending machines and software solutions for bike share systems. The vending machines operate independently of the power grid (solar), integrate visually and operationally with existing bike share platforms, and offer the option for a helmet return bin. Our team won the MIT Fall 2011 2.009 Design Competition, and formed into a start-up immediately after to get the technology onto riders' heads. In 2013, HelmetHub debuted alongside Hubway bike share systems around the city of Boston. |
As a founding member of Helmet Hub, my involvement began at product inception. We exhausted several other ideas, such as smart luggage and collapsible "bike-ports," as we progressed through the semester. We settled on HelmetHub, since it had a well-defined and specified market need and had the best technical feasibility.
After finalizing our product direction, we each generated industrial design concepts and together selected a final concept: a gravity-fed kiosk. I managed several portions of the project, designed several iterations of prototypes, crafted the helmet reloading experience and driving technology, and designed and fabricated the electromechanical system behind the machine. |
Patented technology
"The present disclosure provides systems and methods for the dispensing and collection of objects in urban environments. More particularly, the disclosure provides systems and methods for dispensing and collecting helmets. The disclosure provides a self-sufficient, high-capacity, helmet dispensing system. In some embodiments, the system includes solar panels that provide the system with the requisite power needed to power the system. In some implementations, the system includes a vandal resistant return mechanism for the helmets. The system may also include communication modules, which may transmit system information to a backend server."
|
Hear me present!Speaking at 2.009 Product Design Review in October 2011, presenting an industrial design concept that allowed for crack detection of returned helmets using computer vision that we prototyped in Matlab.
|
|