At the Copenhagen Summit, the researchers SENSEable City Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a bicycle wheel that can recover energy, used to support the push, to record your journey. Good Thing: It can be installed on our good old bicycle.

Roll, you are tracked! The researchers Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Of laboratory SENSEable CityHave designed a new type of bicycle wheel based hybrid systems of automobiles. It is not an electric bike but a system of energy recovery. "When you brake, your kinetic energy is recovered by an electric motor and then stored in batteries in the wheel, so you can use it again when you need it" says Carlo Ratti director of this project called "the wheel of Copenhagen" In a nod to the summit last December.

Innovation is also in its adaptability. The wheel does contain all the necessary equipment and requires no additional electronic equipment to be functional. It can therefore be established on all the old bikes in circulation.

Thoroughly exploit the information provided by sensors, MIT researchers have also developed a host of additional features. Using a Bluetooth connection to communicate with iPhone The wheel can monitor the speed of the bicycle, the direction, distance traveled and collected data on air pollution. It can even identify friends who are nearby.

The first prototypes of the Wheel of Copenhagen have been developed with the company Ducati Energia and the Italian Ministry of Environment. It should go into production next year, with a price competitive with that of a conventional electric bicycle.