A Guided Tour of how “Smart” is being injected into Cities
Asia-Pacific is leading the world’s smart city evolution, with a number of cities across the region rolling out smart city initiatives and investing to build a better place for their people to live and work. In fact, a staggering $63.4 billion has been earmarked for investment in smart city technology in the Asia-Pacific region, reflecting the overwhelming efforts by cities in the region to promote smart city transformations.
In this blog series, we will look at the smart city developments in the region and the innovations adopted to improve people’s lives.
Internet of Things as Backbone of a Smart City
There is one thing that many consider as the backbone of a smart city and we should discuss first – the Internet of Things (IoT). It refers to a huge network of things which are connected to the internet. Along with the wide availability of high-speed internet access and the growing number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices and sensors, IoT technology has become increasingly sophisticated, allowing connected things not only to link to the internet but also talk to each other.
As you can imagine, the increasingly sophisticated IoT technology gives rise to a massive amount of data collected from everyday objects. Mining multiple data sets with big data conjoint analytics will give us not just a single-dimensional view of the world but multi-dimensional perspectives and insights. In the context of smart cities, these insights can help better urban planning in terms of transportation systems, water and electricity supply, waste and pollution management, and more.
To build the IoT backbone of smart cities, “interconnectedness” between people, devices and systems is essential.
In order for a city to become ‘smart’, it needs to be highly interconnected. A truly smart city requires digital infrastructures that can physically link dispersed sensors, devices and machines that make up public systems, services and experiences, so they can exchange information in real time. As a result, interconnection has a central role to play in bringing together all the applications, data, content, clouds, networks and people involved in our daily lives.
This will mean that technology can take a far more active role to offer convenience to people. For example, a digital device may draw on multiple channels of data to help us ensure we attend all our appointments or complete all the planned tasks on a given day, rather than simply sending us reminders.
Leveraging interconnected IoT ecosystems, connected devices can send an order to our local coffee lounge for pick up during our commute, let us know what time the bus will go through our neighborhood, read us the news we are most interested in or suggest what we should do before a crucial hospital appointment.
