Overview
Between April 2024 and January 2025, a technology research and development pilot was undertaken for a new safety technology aimed to mitigate the risk of motorcycle road crashes. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that of the 1.2 million road deaths that occur globally each year, 93% of these deaths occur in developing countries where motorcycle use is a predominant mode of transportation. Due to the design of motorcycles, riders are considered “vulnerable road users” as it only takes a crash, at a modest speed, to result in injury or death to riders. As such, an opportunity exists, with technology, to mitigate the risk that riders face. To this end, Motorcycle Safety Solutions (MSS) was formed to design, develop and test risk mitigating countermeasures.
With the large number of motorcycles in operation in Indonesia, MSS selected Indonesia as its initial test location. World-renowned road safety researchers at the University of Indonesia and the Institut Teknologi Bandung were contracted to conduct an evaluation study to assess the safety benefits of RideHawk™, a new technology from MSS to support rider safety.
Method
Ten first generation RideHawk™ units were developed and installed on volunteer participants own motorbikes. Participants were selected based on their self-report of being active (daily) riders. Each participant was affiliated with the universities as either students, faculty, or otherwise connected to faculty. The study was a “before-after” design where after RideHawk™ was installed, it was place in “data collection” mode and no risk mitigation functionality (e.g., alerts) were operational. After approximately 1 month of baseline data collection, to assess normative riding behavior and performance, RideHawk™ functionality was activated. Using this method, safety impacts can be analyzed by comparing rider performance with the alerts to that same rider’s performance prior to the alert activation.
Results
Over the course of the study, a total of 647 trips were recorded, resulting in a cumulative trip duration of 269 hours. Though a number of interesting findings resulted from this pilot, and those will be detailed in an academic publication expected to be released late 2025 or early 2026, two key findings regarding safety are highlighted below. Keep in mind that the system was designed to mitigate the risk that riders face each time they use their bikes.
The first key finding, and not unexpected as highlighted in Figure 1, was that risk varied widely across the 10 participants with some riders showing minimal risk, while other riders, being more aggressive, had a great risk. Risk was assessed in the analyses by recording and comparing the frequency of forward collision warning (FCW) alerts before and after the system was activated. What is important about this finding is the RideHawk™ was able to capture unique riding behaviors across the study cohort and able to identify those riders, within a cohort, that have the highest risk. This is an important finding as those with the highest risk can be targeted for tailored rider training based on the rider’s own performance limitations (this will be active in future versions of RideHawk™). That is, before issuing targeted training, it had to be established that RideHawk™ could identify the risk for each rider.
