Beyond safety, which is discussed below, our solution works to make biking less of a hassle for commuters, which can in result incentivize more people to ride bikes regularly, and consequently maintain better physical health. Additionally, we intend our solution to be designed in a way that does not adversely affect the health of individuals who use it or the broader health of the public. By using safe and non-toxic materials and employing standards and disclaimers that prevent and/or call out any potential hazards for using the product, we intend to ensure our product does no physical, emotional, or mental harm to our users.

As identified in our former research, we recognize that the growing popularity of micro-mobility across the world has put pressures on safety considerations regarding bike riders on public roads. In the U.S. nearly 1,000 people died from injuries caused by bicycle rashes and 550,000 persons are treated in emergency departments for injuries related to bicycle riding. Head injuries account for 62% of bicycle-related deaths, 33% of bicycle-related emergency department visits, and for 67% of bicycle-related hospital admissions (Injury-control recommendations: Bicycle Helmets). Although the rate of injuries caused by micro-mobility is increasing every year, the awareness of its safety is not. According to statistics, only 18 percent of people wear helmets when riding a bike, and wearing a helmet can reduce serious head injury by nearly 70% (2016). Solving the problem of difficult-to-use protective gear for micro-mobility users becomes urgent.

While we can't address all issues of bike safety, we can ensure that our solution encourages safe bike riding and does not interfere with a biker's ability to ride their bike safely. In design our concept, we chose a location on the bike to attach the helmet in a way that does not obstruct the bike rider's view or ability to steer the bike. Rather, the omnipresent nature of the helmet being consistently placed in front of the bike rider instead provides soft nudges to encourage helmet wearing more often, and consequently, a decrease in safety risk.

In considering the welfare of our society, our solution contributes to the promotion of bike riding as a form of commuting and incentivizes safety during these commutes. Through this philosophy, our solution intends to help more and more people get to work and be able to access other welfare needs (childcare, food, healthcare, etc.) at long distance locations, while lowering the risk of physical accidents that could jeopardize a person's ability to perform a job or accumulate financial risk. In ensuring equitable and inclusive access to our product, we intend to market our solution widely to all who may need it.

As mentioned before, in the long run, we want to expand the market so that our products can have an impact on the global market and play a role in healthy competition, in order to stimulate more similar products to emerge and improve the experience and mitigate stigma around helmet wearing across the globe. Recognizing that bike transportation is widely popular in many countries outside of the US, we have considering adaptability into our design considerations to ensure that our solution can fit and meet the contexts of different helmet types and bike sizes that differ across the globe.

We recognize that different cultures have different norms, perspectives, and views on helmet safety. This is exactly why we incorporated free will into our criteria, to ensure that through our solutions bikers still had the freedom of choice to wear a helmet whether they wanted to or not. As we begin to advance the fidelity of the solution, we plan to look across cultures to ensure that the aesthetic, material use, and functions of our solution are respectful of all cultures.

Similar to our cultural considerations, we recognize that bicycle safety can have a social stigma depending on a person's social environment. More notably, many bike riders express a lack of confidence or shame for being judged when not wearing a helmet when riding in areas where helmet wearing is the norm. This is why our solution considers a biker's free will. Our solution intends to allow bike riders to socially signal that safety is important to them without coercing bikers to make a choice of when and how to wear their helmet.

To the greatest extent possible, we intend to use of sustainable or renewable materials to ensure our solution fits within a circular economy system and contributes to net zero carbon emissions. To ensure this, we will be evaluating the manufacturing process and usage of our solution through a high level life cycle assessment to ensure that the least amount of environmental energy can be used, and that after the solutions lifespan ends, the it can be disposed of in a way that does not create unnecessary waste on the planet.

While designing and constructing this solution, we intend to focus on keeping material and production costs low in order to position our solution at a price range that is reasonable accessible by most common commuters regardless of socioeconomic status. By doing a conjoint analysis study in our next steps, we can begin to understand what willingness to pay for our solution will be and subsequently price our product in a way that is economically accessible and viable.

1. https://www.leespring.com/learn-about-torsion-springs#:~:text=Torsion%20springs%20are%20helical%20springs,back%20to%20their%20original%20position.

2. https://www.outfit4events.com/eur/articles/historical-armor/how-to-determine-a-helmet-size-correctly/