Impact on biker effort of electric bicycle utilization: Results from on-road monitoring in Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract

The objective of this work was to estimate the biker real physiological impacts (more specifically heart rate) of using electric bicycles (EB) instead of conventional bicycles (CB), by developing an appropriate methodology for on-road bio-signals data analysis. From the on-road monitoring data of 6 bikers, 2 routes and 3 bicycles in Lisbon, the results indicate a 57 % average reduction in HR variation from the use of EB, since under high power demanding situations, the electric motor attenuates human effort. The energy expenditure evaluation indicates that the total energy spent reaches ≈70 Wh/km for CB, while for EB that value is of ≈51 Wh/km of human energy (28 % lower than the CB) and ≈9 Wh/km of electricity consumption, resulting in a total of ≈60 Wh/km. As a result, using the EB allow a 14 % reduction in the total energy per km compared to the CB.