A screenshot of the prototype Caremates developed. There is a dashboard with patients and relevant categories listed.

Team Psyclepath’s mission is to make everyday life easier for cyclists in Hamburg. Their tool makes it possible to identify infrastructure deterioration and take faster, more efficient action to repair it.

Everything began with a straightforward challenge from Hamburg's Landesbetrieb für Straßen, Brücken und Gewässer (LSBG) to us:

Wouldn't it be great if LSBG engineers could inspect bike infrastructure without going there?

The team quickly got to work figuring out why this wasn't yet possible and discovered the root cause:
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The manual way bicycle routes are now maintained and monitored is very labor-intensive and time consuming for construction engineers.

As a result, too few areas in need of repair can be eliminated and bicyclists wait longer than necessary for the upkeep of bike infrastructure and pathways.

Departments within the city currently carry out weekly inspections and record issues. This manual approach can take up to four weeks for data gathering, yet the information delivered to the appropriate engineers is still occasionally incomplete, forcing them to do further on-site inspections. This time and manpower could be better spent on the actual repair process.

The solution: The BumpHunter app to crowd-source the latest and most reliable data about Hamburg's bike infrastructure.

In order to address this issue, the team Psyclepath created the BumpHunter platform and app: With the assistance of the cycling community, engineers are able to obtain fast and comprehensive information regarding road damage. Through an app they have downloaded on their phones, cyclists—who have a strong intrinsic incentive to improve the quality of the network of cycle paths—can upload images and videos and report damages they see on the roadways. They assign a rating to the damages based on how dangerous and uncomfortable they are.

The data that the riders submit is compiled into a database and made available to the construction engineers on a platform in the form of a graphical summary. They can now quickly assess the situation. The damages can be evaluated based on the level of danger they pose and the impact they have on riders. They can pinpoint the exact location of the issue on a map with the aid of GPS. The City of Hamburg is thus always up to date on the state of the "on-the-go" cycle paths.

Artificial intelligence and image recognition assist in the analysis of the images and the data to validate the information, remove duplicates and irrelevant or unneeded data, and prioritize the need for action. Furthermore, similarity scores can be computed to find examples that are similar, make inferences about the repair, and improve the planning of the repair.

BumpHunter will support the City of Hamburg in more quickly, effectively, and efficiently identifying and repairing defects to the bicycle infrastructure. More promptly damage identification and classification will enable engineers to optimize resource use for repairs. In the end, better and safer bike pathways make Hamburg’s cyclists happy.

Team picture of Gen Why in the wintergarden

Learnings & Benefit

The community contributes: The cycling community is very intrinsically motivated to provide knowledge and data to help gather the required data.

Efficiency through AI: Engineers can benefit from enhanced data quality and assistance with prioritization through the use of artificial intelligence and image recognition.

Digitization helps: Construction engineers, in this scenario, are able to maximize resource utilization and focus on the critical aspects of their work thanks to the automation and digitization of manual operations.