Final Project – Essay – Sagar Risal

LED Biking Jacket 

This jacket would be primarily for bikers who like biking at night, since the jacket would offer the ability to alert other bikers as well as cars where they are on the road. I researched on which field wearable LEDs could be used, and biking was one where there is a lot potential usage of this technology. There are many accidents regarding drivers not being able to see bikers, and while there are jackets that have reflective material on them, there aren’t ones that can tell which direction one is turning, which would help alert people behind them. A lot of bike accidents don’t usually come from cars, but instead other bikes who didn’t know someone in front of them was turning, so this jacket would have LEDs on the back of the jacket that one could control to tell in which direction they are going as well as alert drivers of their position which could help cause less accidents. 

To make this jacket I took in consideration what a bike rider would lack at night. Obviously the ability to see clearly is important, but what is more important than that is the driver’s safety. If a car or other bikers aren’t able to see a biker at night then the bike rider is much more likely to get hit. If the biker is able to wear a jacket that illuminates them then the risk of getting hit goes down tremendously and the biker’s safety is better ensured. For turning left and right, the biker could have special buttons on the gloves of the jacket as to provide an easy access to a sort of “turn signal” for the biker. This also provides another level of safety towards the biker since other bikers in the back would be able to know if the biker is turning or not through the LEDs on the biker’s back. 

For me to complete all the things I need to do in time, I think the biggest area I would need to work on is getting the LED panels to work wirelessly, so that I can integrate them to the jacket. The second biggest thing would probably be combining the buttons and hardware into the jacket so that the design can work well and look good. Other than that, the code for the actual jacket itself, shouldn’t take too long. I just would need to create different colored screens on processing, as well as different patterns that are able to change through Arduino. Since we have gone over most of it in past recitations this part shouldn’t cause that much difficulty.  

While trying to come up with a good idea for my final project, the idea of wearable LEDs kept popping up into my head, since I loved how they looked and just imagining how cool they would look if one wore them made me want to research on what I could make with LEDs. Most wearable LEDs are used for fashion or costumes but when I stumbled upon the biking jackets that have reflective panels, I wondered if maybe they could look better and be more intuitive with LEDs instead of just reflective panels. I have also been biking a lot more in Shanghai since the cost of renting a bike is very cheap and they are almost everywhere. It was also part of this reason that I thought that doing something with bikes would be a good idea. In the reading for Human Centered Design it explains how  “Immersing yourself in another world not only opens you up to new creative possibilities, but it allows you to leave behind preconceived ideas and outmoded ways of thinking”. This mindset was definitely a key part in choosing to do this project and helped me come up with this idea for a LED biker jacket. After witnessing so many near misses or even bikers getting hit just in my time here in the city, I thought adding certain interactive elements to the biker’s jacket could help improve the safety of not only bikers, but the people who also share the road and sidewalks with them. Hopefully this awareness in biker safety can help cause less accidents and also be a new style for bikers around the world.  

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