A wearable ECG-HR detector and its application to automatic assist-mode selection of an electrically assisted bicycle

Recently, an electrically assisted bicycle has been widely used in daily life and becomes very popular. The user selects the stepwise assist-mode to determine the assistive torque for pleasurable running. From the viewpoint of improvement of health by exercise, the electrically assisted bicycle can be an exercise machine like a treadmill. The heart rate (HR) is regarded as an indication of exercise load. This paper presents an automatic assist-mode selection system based on the HR of the bicycle user. The HR is obtained from the R-waves measured by the proposed wearable electrocardiograph on the user. The mode-selection system is simply implemented by a personal computer, USB-connected interface, and some electronic switching circuits. The running experiments confirm that the proposed assist-mode selection method has practicability.