Recently I’ve been working out at the gym more often (i.e. I had never done so before college). I’ve found that I prefer the bike because I used to bike to work out at home but I don’t have a bike here. While I prefer a real bike, the one benefit of the gym bikes is that they can use the known resistance of the setting you’re using plus the speed of your pedaling to calculate calories burned. While I have a device to keep track of miles and average speed on my bike at home, it cannot count calories burned because it has no way to know the resistance because that’s a function of not only the gear setting but also of the incline (obviously going up a hill is more difficult than going downhill).
Really, it’d be nice to have a way for the bike to get the angle of incline and from that calculate the calories burned in the same way that the electric bikes do that. So I was thinking about how you could go about this and came up with the idea of an IR sensor of some sort. Basically, if a source of infrared could be placed on the front of the bike, the detector (in the form of a long, thin rectangle) could be placed on the part that holds up the seat. The source would have to be able to stay pointing toward the seat support at all times and have to be able to respond to changes in the incline. This could be possible using a device like a gyroscope or maybe even a simple mechanical device. Either way, the source would tilt in response to an incline and the detector would be able to measure the distance between the default position (when the terrain is flat) and the current position. There is a maximum angle that the bike could measure with this system that is based on the distance between the source and the detector and the length of the detector. This is just an estimate for one dimension for a bike:
Just as I found the maximum angle possible using trigonometry, each point along the detector would correspond to an angle that could be looked up in a memory storage device. Thus, with just a few simple components, a device that already measures the speed and distance could be expanded to measure the calories you burned as a function of your weight.
Alternatively, you could just use a device that measures the angle on its own like those found in phones.
Alternatively, you could just use a device that measures the angle on its own like those found in phones.
Several points:
ReplyDeleteI could see how this would work. Some sort of digital level device would seem to do the trick as well.
They do sell cycling power meters, most of which seem to involve strain guages that measure the power being delivered to the bike by the person.
I'm not sure how bicycling efficiency plays into this - if you have a more efficent stroke or just build up your muscles, you would going uphill at the same angle and at the same speed but using less power than the inefficient person riding next to you.
Second comment:
ReplyDeleteBike Virginia is June 22. Start building your device.