**4. Case Study**

To validate the proposed system, a case study was carried out with real participants using the platform and the application for mobile devices called *ebikemotion*. The testing took place over four months between March and June of 2017 and included nine participants who travelled a total of 551 routes. Out of the nine case study participants, seven were located in Spain (five in Salamanca and two in Palencia), one in Italy (Volverra) and another in Switzerland (Corseaux). All of them are members of the team that worked on developing the software and hardware of the *ebikemotion* platform and on its testing. None of the participants presented any notable health problems and they were not remunerated for their collaboration in the study. All participants wore a heart rate sensor that was compatible with the app. After completing the study, the users made a personal evaluation of their experience in the study.

Before starting the study, the participants' physical fitness was determined to make two groups of users: Users with high physical activity and users with low physical activity. Users with high physical activity are those who practice sports for more than 6 h a week, including cycling. Users who have low physical activity are those who do exercise for less than 3 h a week and do not use the bicycle. The objective of distinguishing these two groups is to be able to compare the progress of the most active users with that of less active users. Table 3 defines the characteristics of the nine users participating in the study. As can be seen, Users 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 have a high activity during the week, exceeding 9 h of exercise per week, while Users 6, 7, 4, 9 have very little physical activity during the week.


**Table 3.** Set of users for the case of study.

For the purposes of this case study, all participants had an electric bicycle at their disposal. All bicycles were equipped with the PAS system and were compatible with the *ebikemotion* application. The bicycle of User 1 was road type while the rest of the users' bikes were MTB type or city bikes. The power of the engines of the different bicycles oscillated depending on their model, ranging in their maximum power from 250 W to 750 W.
