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6. Internet of Things
Internet of Things is no news. Sensors (most IoTs are sensors) are everywhere and a city with a million people has probably over hundred million sensors (a smartphone has some 14 sensors, a car can have 200 sensors, a home can have a hundred or more sensors … you can do the math).
Today these sensors are clustered in thousands of non-communicating silos, some are embedded in devices (like a car…) and do not share their data to the internet. More and more cities are moving towards an open data framework to support their sharing and use platforms to host services that can access these data.
In a smart city you build from scratch, like BleuTech Park, there is the opportunity to design the types and placement of sensors making their data even more significative.
However, since the number of smart cities that will be built from scratch is marginal (you can count in units… whilst existing cities are in millions), there is a lot of effort going on in finding ways to leverage on what is existing, even though the deployment and growth of sensors in these cities took place bottom up, outside of any organic planning. Here comes some surprise.
In a recent study, reported in June 2019, MIT researchers have revealed that if you have mobile sensors, like the ones on public taxis, a very little number can harvest very significant data. In the study they point out that by getting data from just 10 taxis (randomly selected) in Manhattan you are able to cover about a third of Manhattan. Now, it is not going to scale linearly: with 30 taxis you will cover not all of Manhattan but just 50% and if you gather data from a 1,000 taxis you’ll cover 85% of Manhattan.
Of course a municipality may seek the help of its citizenship and may harvest a massive amount of data from their smartphones, it may impose every vehicle to be equipped with specific sensors, starting with public transportation that is usually under control of the municipality (and easier to subject to specific regulation).
A municipality, as it is being
done in Singapore, can impose regulation on existing, and for sure on new buildings, to embed sensors and provide data. As an example, in Italy there is a regulation (set up in the last few years) forcing people selling or renting a house/apartment to pay a technician to assess the insulation of the whole construction (energetic certification). Now this requirements, as so many we enjoy in Italy, does not have any sense, first because it is a snapshot that may not be true after a few weeks (you change a window pane and the data would be different), second because it does not provide the dynamic picture of the use and waste of heating/air conditioning and so on. All this when we already would have the data to get very precise, day by day measurement of what is going on. Most Italian homes have digital meters measuring the amount of power used, both in electricity, gas terms. With these data, and the cadastral digital lay out and data of the building/house/apartment, you can immediately derive all data related to energy dispersion. More than that. Since this provides a dynamic, day by day accurate snapshot, you can also match it against the weather condition, temp, humidity, wind and this can provide much more accurate intelligence not just on the energy waste but also on what could be done to decrease it.
The big issue we are facing today, in cities as in many other context, is not the lack of data but the very little use we make of these data. One aspect, already mentioned in a previous post, is the need to create awareness. If the “energetic certificate” would be substituted by data showing, possibly through augmented reality, the amount of money you are wasting in this specific day through a window pane or a roof not well insulated I am sure people will take immediate action to stop the trickle of money that everyday we waste to poorly constructed buildings.
To get a feeling on heat dispersion you can try to llok with an infrared camera the landscape of your city. You’ll discover parts that are reddish (high dispersal) and other that are blueish (well insulated). What it would be really good, and much more effective, is the possibility of seeing, overlaid on each image the $ amount per day that such dispersion is costing…
IoT will be more and more coupled (watch the clip) with augmented reality, meaning that the data they are harvesting will become visible and “understandable”, because the metrics can be moved from W to $ and we are surely better in grasping $ than W.
