Sensor and service that turns rides into carbon credits
rideem.bike
A sensor on the bike verifies that every ride is real, the app accumulates the distance, and a third-party carbon registry turns it into money.
- Client
- Proposed to a global chain maker’s North American office
- Period
- 2021 – 2023
- Status
- Product concept
- Our role
- Hardware spec, app and web service design
The problem
It started with a global chain maker’s North American office, which wanted to work out — and tell consumers — when a chain needs replacing. But a sensor cannot sit on a chain, and “a device that only tells you when to change your chain” is a hard sell. Riders needed a reason of their own to install it. Cycling is healthy, clean and saves energy, but riders get nothing tangible back. In April 2018, the UN Clean Development Mechanism ruled that projects replacing fossil-fuel vehicles with bicycles can earn saleable carbon credits — provided each ride can be proven genuine.
What we did
- 01Three parts: a sensor on the bike, a smartphone app, and a web service.
- 02Sensor: Bluetooth 5.0 with a 3-axis G-sensor, drawing 2 mA; one CR2477 battery lasts 500+ hours. Removal requires a special tool, and each ride pairs with only one phone, to prevent padding.
- 03App: woken by Bluetooth at the start of a ride, it combines the phone’s GPS and accelerometer data to judge whether the ride is genuine, then reports to the web service.
- 04Web service: connects with third-party registries such as Verra to redeem verified distance as carbon credits, and runs a carbon-credit marketplace.
- 05Extra services: maintenance reminders, anti-theft alerts, automatic calls for help after a crash, ride history, and finding riders nearby.
- 06For shops and brands: real usage data showing who rides which bike, where and how — and from that, which bikes suit whom and when they need servicing.
Where it stands
- At 0.22 kg of CO₂ per car-kilometre and US$90 per tonne, someone who drives 20,000 km a year could earn back about US$400 a year by switching to a bicycle.
- Building on the Bicyclive concept and adding carbon credits as the reason riders would want it, we designed the sensor, app flow and service architecture. Carbon-credit organizations also approached us, and the project began to take shape.
- A service like this needs a funding partner to be built. In the end the investment was not approved, and the project stopped in 2023.
Built with
Bluetooth 5.0G-sensorMobile appWeb serviceCarbon registry API