The final test phase and fine-tuning has begun for ByPoint in Assen. The world’s first bicycle fall detection system that can sound an alarm in the event of a fall or accident without using a mobile phone. It should be for sale at a number of bike shops at the end of September early October. After that it will probably go fast, that is the expectation.
How the – then – Asser student Joris Koops (26) came to an invention: “I came up with the device in 2019 because my grandmother was an active cyclist. She recently had an electric bicycle and made further trips more often because of the convenience At a certain point there were more and more reports about the increase in unilateral bicycle accidents in the Netherlands. Subsequently, I started to wonder what would happen if my grandmother fell. She does have a mobile phone, but she can help herself. Realizing it after an accident is a completely different story. This was the start of the development process for a fall detection system especially for cyclists that works without connecting a mobile phone or app.”
In 2019 and 2020, Koops delved deeper into the subject during his entrepreneurship & retail management training at Hanze University of Applied Sciences and wrote a thesis about it. “I soon found out that prompt alarm after a bicycle accident is of great importance for the further course of injuries.”
The sooner the patient is in hospital, the greater the chance of a successful operation and the better the chance of rehabilitation afterwards. But due to the increase in cyclists, and especially because people are cycling faster, the number of accidents is increasing, to 50,000 per year in the Netherlands. Due to the higher speed, the injury is often more serious. So there’s work to be done, Koops concluded.