NEW TRACKING DEVICE INSTANTLY ALERTS OWNERS WHEN THEIR BICYCLE IS STOLEN
Bike Tracker product from embedded systems experts Abelon Systems is based on IoT Reference Platform
Bicycles are very attractive to thieves because they are valuable, widely available, easy to sell and often poorly secured. In 2015 over 320,000 bikes were stolen in England and Wales, around one every 90 seconds.
Edinburgh-based Abelon Systems today announced its new bike tracker product which automatically detects when a bicycle is moved. If the owner’s smartphone is not detected at the same time, meaning they are not nearby, the device instantly sends an alert and GPS data to the Monitoring Station, which immediately forwards this to the owner’s phone.
This new tracker device is Abelon’s first product based upon their recently announced ‘Internet-of-Things’ (IoT) Reference Platform, which supports a wide variety of sensor types and communications technologies, including Bluetooth 5. The platform has two main variants; one with GPS for tracking mobile assets, the other for data acquisition and/or monitoring of static assets.
The new product is currently in development and the company anticipates having units ready for trial by summer this year; it was only in December 2016 that Abelon received a SMART Award grant for Feasibility R & D to help bring the product to market, so the IoT Platform has made possible a dramatically shortened product development lifecycle.
The device is secured to a bicycle frame by fixings that are approved to the ‘Sold Secure’ standard, the industry standard for bicycle locks. It is powered by a high-performance, rechargeable battery and the very low power consumption means that it will only need to be charged about once per month.
Setup involves simply pairing the device with the owner’s smartphone, which can then manage the device.
Ian Smith, Managing Director at Abelon, commented; “This is a new departure for us; we remain firmly focused on designing and developing best-in-class embedded software solutions for our high-profile customers, but the IoT platform gives us the ability to create a range of asset tracking, data acquisition and remote monitoring products.”
