Problem

Bicycle theft is a huge problem throughout the world. Each year at least 100 000 bicycles get stolen in Finland alone. In Europe, the same number is over three million increasing at 8% annually with only 2% - 6% solved cases. The cost and ease of disassembling of bicycles makes it counterproductive for police to be involved. There are solutions that try to mitigate bicycle theft but none of them work reliably. Some of the solutions rely on GPS but in these cases only the owner can receive the signal and the device’s battery life can be poor. Other solutions rely on Bluetooth but pairing and using the tag can be unreliable and complex. The bicycle anti-theft devices industry is just starting and many companies will be launching products this year such as:spybike, sherlock, boomerang, caveo trac, etc .

Solution

Haavi is a gamified tracking system for stolen bicycles. Bicycles are equipped with a Bluetooth tag. The tracker application installed on smartphones is able to catch the bluetooth signal and check if the bike is reported as stolen. Since the tag doesn’t utilize GPS or cellular networks, the cost of the product can be kept nominal even for users with less expensive bikes.

• No pairing needed; the tag only broadcasts a unique ID signal
• The app verifies the ID via the backend server
• Because of the simplicity of the device, low battery usage is achieved
• The system relies on community, the formation of which will be achieved by creating a gamified system
• App users try to find stolen bikes with the provided estimation of their distance to them

Implementation

Haavi includes four main components: the Bluetooth tag, the mobile application, the backend server and the administration view for our internal usage. The mobile application is written in React Native, whereas the backend and the administration view are written in Ruby on Rails. The Bluetooth tag is being prototyped based on RuuviTag. For our uses, it features Bluetooth connection capable of 1km open air range, and an accelerometer.

link to demo video