Copenhagen may be famous for the little mermaid and Nordic noir, but there is one thing with which it’s virtually synonymous: bicycles. Often called the most cycle-friendly city in the world, it seemed the ideal place to look for a solution to a deceptively simple question: how can you get more people to cycle?

“We thought that if we can do something to get more people to cycle [in Copenhagen], we could transmit it anywhere,” said Assaf Biderman, associate director for the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT. Their solution: the Copenhagen Wheel.

Fundamentally, it is a back wheel equipped with an electric hybrid motor, batteries and sensors, that powers up when you need it the most.

“The experience is as if the ground had shrunk underneath your feet, or that a hill disappears,” says Biderman. The beauty of the Copenhagen Wheel is its apparent simplicity: designed with no external wires or components, it can be retro-fitted to almost any bike frame. But don’t let that fool you, its insides are packed with the latest tech.

Using a kinetic energy recovery system (KERS), the wheel is able to capture the energy from braking. This however can only take a rider so far as there are “always losses when you regenerate, which means you can’t regenerate as much as you put in”. This means that it requires a 4 hour charge overnight if the rider wants the motor to assist them all the time. By tracking the rider’s speed, incline, and peddle power, the wheel can then calculate at what exact point you need an extra boost the most, such as when you’re going uphill, and the motor kicks in.

“As you cycle, the wheel studies how your feet move. It studies your pedalling and integrates itself seamlessly,” says Biderman. But that’s not all that it studies. Containing 12 sensors to detect everything from speed, pollution, GPS and even the location of potholes, the data generated is vast and varied. And it could be invaluable to city planners. Shared anonymously, the aggregated data from riders could be used to better understand cyclists’ habits, and thus help city planners serve cyclists better.

The team have also released a ‘developers kit’ version of the wheel. This allows other people to customise and write new software, creating new apps and altering the behaviour profiles of the wheel, which anyone could then download and use. “This is maybe a half romantic idea…” explained Biderman, “but also it allows you to really tap into other peoples thinking, outside your own.”

As is so often the case, if there’s one drawback, it’s the price. At $799 (£510), the Copenhagen Wheel doesn’t come cheap, though compared with most electric bikes, it’s a significant discount. But if they can get more people on a bike by making the distances seem smaller and hills seem flatter, while improving cities for all cyclists, maybe they’ve gone and done the impossible, and reinvented the wheel.