Build On What You Know

By Mike Beevor, Digi.CIty Expert in Residence - IOT

I thought that I would use this article to expand on a concept I introduced in a previous article – Don’t bite off more than you can chew and don’t be Leeroy Jenkins and ruin it for everyone else!

While it remains one of my favourite Internet occurrences of all time, there is some sage advice that can be transposed directly into your smart city journey.

Solve Specific Problems.

Photo by Nathan Waters on Unsplash

Each city has different needs and requires different problem-solving techniques.  A different solution is often required to solve the same problem from city to city based on national, state, regional and even local regulatory issues.

Smart city strategies are usually broken down into eight  categories (Frost & Sullivan 2014) comprising - Smart Governance, Smart Energy, Smart Building, Smart Mobility, Smart Infrastructure, Smart Technology, Smart Healthcare and Smart Citizen.

In every one of these categories, technology plays a central role.  In particular, the Internet of Things (IoT)  IS the foundation for the data that your smart city will create, analyse and use in order to become smarter.

My advice here is to find small, significant problems to solve - you’re not going to solve homelessness or poverty with a single IoT project.  These are macro-scale issues that will require myriad smaller projects working in harmony to tackle.

Your projects should be able to be defined in a maximum of two short sentences and when asked how you would measure the results or success of the solution; you should be able to answer it in under 30 seconds.

One of the biggest issues I faced, and have been guilty of myself, is “scope creep”.  It usually comes from a good place… My personal weakness is “Ooooh… If we added this technology AS WELL, we could do this too!” – I promise, if you are working with me and you hear me utter those words, you have my express permission to throw something at me.

If you keep the project strongly defined, then cost is more manageable and the project is more likely to be on time, on budget and meet fewer obstacles from opponents.  In short, it is more likely to succeed.

Consult, Consolidate, Consult, Involve

I am an enormous fan of getting your residents involved with your smart city projects, and also offering them the chance to define the projects that are addressed first.  

Now, I am not suggesting a carte blanche approach here, where every person  has the opportunity to suggest a project, but you can certainly take the opinion of their elected leaders – councillors, first responders, charity leaders, business group leaders etc as to the largest problems that they face within the city.  My advice is to do this on an individual basis.  You will likely find that the same few topics come up time and again.  This is the first Consult in the section title.

I also advocate creating a series of Smart City Committees – One for each of the eight  key areas of a smart city.  However, the composition of that committee is probably different  from what you may think…

You committee should be largely made up of technologists.

They should be volunteers from your local tech community, be a resident of your city or town and will be mandated to work for the good of the city solving specific problems.  You will  be surprised just how eager those residents are to get involved.

The committee’s role is to take the list of problems from the initial consult and Consolidate them into the appropriate categories and remove duplicate problems from within a category.  You will end up with a shortlist of the most commonly voiced problems.

The committee then has the task of designing a conceptual solution to each problem, based on their technology knowledge, knowledge of their city and with guidance from city leadership as to the legality, compliance and affordability of the solution, and trust me, I have heard many solutions to city problems ranging from the mildly ludicrous to the truly sublime!  In solving problems, some of the best answers come from those on the outside looking in - advice that is always worth bearing in mind.

Once those conceptual solutions have been created, budgeted and verified, a simple project synopsis is created, outlining the problem being solved and the solution for the problem in language that a non-technical resident will understand.

Back to Consult – In this stage, the shortlist of problem synopses is opened up for a public vote – simply put, what do your residents want you to solve first.  This is also your Involve stage.  You are involving your residents to make their own city better.  It is also important to be transparent with the process behind the projects and how the solutions are arrived at.  If necessary, hold public forums.

I would be delighted to help any city leaders who feel that this is a strong initiative to help create their committee structure and process.

Build On What You Know

Now, before we get too carried away in IoT’ing all the things, here is a piece of advice that has worked in a large number of smart city projects that I have been involved in.

“Build On What You Know”

In my experience, this usually involves video surveillance.  I guarantee that your city already has it, and it contains the richest possible source of data; after all, we all know that a picture paints a thousand words.  Video is also a great way of introducing the concept of IoT into an environment either using IoT to augment video or using video to augment IoT data.

Video is also an easy opportunity to become smarter and there are myriad, well-defined technologies out there that can analyse video to give you insights into solving problems.  The build on what you know method also helps to keep costs low, as it is using infrastructure and solutions that have already been paid for.

A Real-World Scenario

In this scenario, we can take a fire alarm and make it smarter, with the final outcome being the better protection of our First Responders and a better resolution to a fire-based incident.  It uses existing, in place technology and an IoT sensor to augment them.

A fire alarm is a simple IoT device.  It is either heat-sensitive or carbon-particulate sensitive and it returns a binary response.  There is either a fire, or no fire.  It is a real-time sensor, but prone to false positives.

If we augment this fire alarm with the video camera that is in the area, we can cut down on the false positives, and enhance the information we gather.  Using a video analytic, we can detect smoke or flames (using Machine Learning), and that information is fed into the alarm system to correspond with the fire alarm.  Upon positive detection, the video is automatically clipped and recorded to a second, off-site storage location, and recording continues until the camera or cabling becomes inoperable.  This video will help determine the growth rate and directional spread of the fire.

The final augmentation comes from an air quality sensor, which can break down which  particulates are in the vicinity, and their relative quantities, to better inform us what type of fire it is (chemical, electrical, building etc) and if there are high amounts of hazardous materials.  It can also help us understand how the fire is growing, at what pace and in which direction.

Now, we take all of that data and package it so that upon arrival, first responders have the information they need,  allowing for much stronger decision-making.

There you have it - by augmenting and collating information from a variety of sensors, it is possible to build much richer information and situational awareness.  The example you saw came from devices that you already have in your infrastructure too, you just made them smarter.

It’d be interesting to hear some of your own real world scenarios - please leave them in the comments!