COMMUTER PROFILE
Stress and the Streets
Creative engineer Arlene Ducao commutes by bike. As a researcher at MIT, she invented MindRider — a wearable device that tracks how your bike ride engages your mind, documenting moments of stress or relaxation, and coding them to specific locations on the street. Reclaim sat down with Ducao to talk about bike commuting and its intersection with brain science.
First off, let’s talk bikes. How did you become a bike commuter?
I started cycling seriously in New York City around 2005. My main collaborator, Ilias Koen, and I both worked at the American Museum of Natural History and he started to ride his bicycle about ten miles round trip every day from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side and persuaded me to ride as well. After that, I rode my bike everywhere. Now my commute is short, from where I live to where I teach and do research at NYU’s campus in Downtown Brooklyn.
Along the way, you invented MindRider. What exactly is it?
MindRider tracks how you “feel” when you ride your bike. The actual product is a small wearable device with an electroencephalogram (EEG) module inside. The EEG tracks and records brain wave patterns, which feeds data into an app that Ilias created, called Multimer. This, along with your phone’s GPS, creates a map of your stress and relaxation points on your bike ride. An earlier version of MindRider was built into a bike helmet, and instead of recording data on an app, projected your stress or relaxation to drivers using colored lights.
How did your bike commute inform your invention?
A few ways. The idea for the initial design, when MindRider was a helmet, came because, in New York, when I would attach things to my bike, like a light or a bell, they would get stolen. So I started attaching these things to my helmet. When I got to MIT, I had the opportunity to experiment with some of the new consumer-grade EEG devices on the market. As a cyclist, I felt that signaling clearly and communicating with other users of the street was very important to me — especially because traffic is so dense in New York, and there are so many types of transportation modalities: taxis, buses, pedestrians, and cars. That’s basically how MindRider was born, because I was interested in devices that would help with communication between cyclists and other users of the streetscape. In time, though, we found that there wasn’t a lot of practical application in broadcasting your mental state while you’re cycling, so we shifted to really understanding what we could learn from the mental picture — how your cycling experience can support better streets. Our team has a background in data analysis and visualization, so we began to map cyclists’ neurophysiological data onto the street.
Since then, you have created extensive maps of how cyclists feel riding in Manhattan. What did you find?
One of the places where the data was a surprise, and changed my view of cycling, particularly in Manhattan, came out of some of our earliest studies. We found that much of Midtown was relatively relaxing for a number cyclists, particularly in the areas where there are no more cars. This is true even if there are lots of pedestrians, like around Times Square. The fact that so much of Broadway in the Times Square area is car-free made the rides more relaxing to cyclists, contrary to the common notion that biking in areas like Times Square is extremely stressful.
Even in crowded, chaotic places, removing cars reduces stress?
Absolutely. We also found strong differences between professional career cyclists versus folks who just use a bike to get around — commuting cyclists and casual novice cyclists. The notion of attention is very different between professional cyclists who cycle at least eight hours a day and need to cycle fast, versus other kinds of cyclists. For the professional cyclist, high levels of attention don’t necessarily indicate stress, whereas for the commuter, it usually does indicate stress and a more complex traffic situation. High levels of attention for the career cyclist are more frequent, a little more normal, so to speak, and may be more of an indicator of productivity than anything else.
Have you experimented with MindRider outside New York?
I’ve done a lot of work with the mobility unit of UN-Habitat, which is headquartered in Nairobi. In one study, we collected cycling experience data along proposed Bus Rapid Transit routes for the major arteries in Nairobi to demonstrate that in addition to bus routes, cycling lanes should be considered as part of the street redesign. In that study, the data quantitatively highlighted the rough road conditions that are the most stressful for cyclists. We also worked with UN-Habitat as part of the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur in 2018. The timing was good because it coincided with the opening of Kuala Lumpur’s very first dedicated bike lane. The most active cycling group in Kuala Lumpur recruited a dozen cyclists to ride on the new cycling lane, and then for those who felt comfortable, ride off the cycling lane as well. Biometric data showed a clear difference in cyclist experience on the dedicated cycle track versus nearby roads that have minimal or no cycling infrastructure, and higher levels of attention near sharp turns in the cycling route. That data was delivered to the city government to be used for planning their next dedicated cycling lanes.
What’s next for you and your invention?
The Multimer app has expanded its use beyond transport analysis. We’re working with a number of architectural firms focused on workplace design and experience, comparing similar rooms where one has natural light and one doesn’t, or one has soft furniture and one doesn’t, and trying to understand how that impacts creativity, productivity, and socialization. And then we are back to Nairobi, again with UN-Habitat, where Multimer is going to be used for the very first time with children. There’s a researcher at the United Nations who has been studying children, activity, and obesity in London, and now wants to do some of that work in the slum areas of Nairobi, with Multimer used to support that research. That study should happen soon.
Of all these studies, does one finding stand out?
I’ve been thinking about this, since I’m not in the United States right now, and one of the things that I miss about the US is that the slower your transportation modality is, the more right of way you have. So, pedestrians have the right of way, then cyclists, then motorists. What I love is that the data bears that out. In pedestrians, you see signs of stress around areas that are complex, and are high-traffic areas for cyclists and motorists. And then with cyclists, you see signs of stress in highways or areas that are motorist-friendly or cater to high-speed motor vehicles in tight movement, but not with pedestrian traffic. The right of way as we organize it in the law bears out in the data of our minds.
Get a free subscription to Reclaim Magazine when you join Transportation Alternatives. Start your membership today.
