In this COVID-19 era, the need for health and care systems to become agile and change is very real.

As COVID-19 sweeps around the world, we are starting to see countries exit from lockdown, others introducing more stringent lockdown and others relying on the resilience of their health and care systems to allow them to make changes which are more discreet and focused on trying to avoid the economic and political effects of more stringent approaches.

The explosion of data points

Health and care systems are having to adopt to this new world and suddenly, the old ways of working which relied largely on an analogue world and the bricks and mortar of the ‘office visit’ are starting to look more outdated and out of step with the environment they are working within.

There is an interesting parallel here. Human Coronavirus are a group of viruses that change small parts of their genetic code as part of their life cycle. Thus, they mutate as a matter of course. The challenge is for our health and care systems to also be able to “mutate” at pace and scale. We have never seen this happening before but happening it is, with digital transformation, the use of medical technological devices, the application of AI in the care of people becoming more commonplace.

This is also being accompanied by other significant changes, particularly around the deployment of a whole gamut of new devices and products including wearables which together with the dissemination of a 5G infrastructure and the very sudden increase in take up, are leading to a veritable explosion in the number of data points which are going to become available to different health and care systems globally.

It is now accepted that these changes are here to stay. Not only is COVID-19 a pandemic which is unlikely to vanish with the summer sun in the northern hemisphere, but there is a real urgency to develop the insights we need to deploy AI and improve and personalise the care of people who will be affected on the second wave of contagion which is likely to creep up on us in the autumn above the equator. This means that the reliance on medical technological solutions will increase and increase at a pace and scale we have not witnessed before. This has many potential entry points in the best management of COVID-19 pandemics. From the monitoring of mild cases at home, to the personalised care of patients post discharge from hospitals, at both ends of the COVID-19 journey. To this can be added the better management of contact tracing, and more systematic and technologically enabled monitoring of workforce which is already a scarce resource.

There is also another and often forgotten, dimension. The monitoring of existing non-communicable diseases, largely displaced as the central activity of health systems who are totally focused on managing the pandemic, will require new solutions and the potential here for technology and digital solutions to enable better self-care is considerable.

It is therefore really unlikely that this is a temporary phase. The post COVID-19 world in the 2020s is going to be very different to what came before it.

Deploying technology at scale

So, what are some attributes which will make some devices stand out?

Obviously, they need to fulfil a tangible need and be “good enough” in terms of accuracy, reliability, safety and reproducibility to be deployed at scale. This is largely self-evident but there are five other aspects of how they are deployed which may appear to be less obvious but in fact are equally important.

1. They need to fit within a governance structure so there is clarity around who is responsible for monitoring and action when required. This has in the past been all too often an afterthought. It is all too easy to get enticed by exciting technological advances and deploy them, because it is possible without spending the requisite time ensuring they fit within a clinical workflow and that the workforce implications around their deployment is managed with the same rigour as any other aspect.

2. They need to be built into existing clinical pathways and flows – the technologies that succeed will be the ones that assist clinical decision support and preferably are “baked into” EMRs.

3. They need to be personalised. Ideally, they need to incorporate existing data to provide data which is relevant to the individual and also relevant to the consultation. The age of metadvice is upon us now in this era of precision health and precision medicine.

4. They need to have interoperability built into them via open APIs. Unless one can easily and effortlessly integrate them within an EMR, it is unlikely they can form part of the system into which AI can work its magic and develop the insights we are desperate for to better manage subsequent waves.

5. They must be secure. Cybersecurity takes on an even greater importance and prominence in the age of pandemics.

Thus, the future for med tech is rosy. First movers and fast followers will reap the benefits of easier adoption and incorporation into the mainstream as long as they are true to these principles.

Read the article here: The future of medical technology devices in the time of COVID-19

Smart cities can help us combat the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, in a growing number of countries, smart cities are doing just that. Governments and local authorities are using smart city technology, sensors and data to trace the contacts of people infected with the coronavirus. At the same time, smart cities are also helping in efforts to determine whether social distancing rules are being followed.

On the one hand, such applications of smart technology are exciting and invaluable, particularly in nations that have managed to keep Covid-19 case numbers relatively low, such as South Korea.

But on the other hand, the use of masses of connected sensors makes it clear that the coronavirus pandemic is–intentionally or not–being used as a testbed for new surveillance technologies that may threaten privacy and civil liberties. So aside from being a global health crisis, the coronavirus has effectively become an experiment in how to monitor and control people at scale.

One recent example of this comes from the University of Newcastle, which last week reported on how they’ve been using an array of smart city technology to monitor the effectiveness of the UK government’s social distancing measures.

In particular, the team at the Newcastle University Urban Observatory have analysed more than 1.8 billion pieces of observational data collected in the city of Newcastle over the last few years, including since the UK nationwide lockdown began. Much of this data comes from pedestrian sensors, which monitor pedestrian flows in two directions every hour, and which the team compares against data from 2019.

Analysing this data, the Newcastle University team found that pedestrian traffic has fallen by a massive 95%, in comparison to the usual annual average. Likewise, they’ve also made use of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, and discovered that vehicle traffic has declined by around 50%.

The researchers have also produced models capable of measuring the distance between pedestrians. Making use of a traffic light indicator system, their algorithm is able to anonymously identify and label people who maintain safe distances, while flagging violations.

On its website, the Newcastle University Urban Observatory says it works with “government” and “local authorities” to “make our cities smart.” Dr Luke Smith, a lecturer focusing on data-centric approaches to civil engineering, tells me that the Observatory has provided a range of data to the UK government during the coronavirus pandemic. This includes pedestrian data to the Department for Transport (prior to the nationwide lockdown), as well as vehicle flow and car park data (since the lockdown). The Urban Observatory has also had several discussions regarding using CCTV cameras to measure physical distance between people.

The UK isn’t the only country to harness smart city technology like this in the fight against the coronavirus. In South Korea, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and the Ministry of Science and ICT, have been using a system called the Smart City Data Hub. The two governmental departments use this platform for the purposes of contact tracing. Essentially, it allows them to analyse and monitor data collected from cameras and other sensors, so as to identify who a known coronavirus patient had recently come into contact with.

The South Korean government has been using the Smart City Data Hub since March 16th. It’s hard to say how much of positive impact it has had on stemming the transmission of the coronavirus, but given that South Korea has witnessed a doubling of cases over the past 41 days (while the likes of the US and the UK are doubling cases every eight or nine days), the country has clearly been doing something right.

Again, other countries are turning to smart cities and smart city technology in similar ways. Various Indian cities have been making use of smart city tech to contact trace and also to monitor people under quarantine. In Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, where some 1.72 million people live, the local authorities have called upon Indian firm Tech Mahindra to update the capabilities of the existing smart cities infrastructure it already provides the area.

In particular, Tech Mahindra’s smart cities platform can now make use of traffic cameras to monitor people’s movements. In addition, it’s now using drones for aerial surveillance and is in the processes of rolling out a geo-fencing solution to make sure that patients are restricted to a certain area. Its platform even provides real-time info on when stores and pharmacies are open.

According to officials, such smart city solutions have helped India curb its coronavirus numbers.

“Using tech along with community-led initiatives […] has helped contain the growth in numbers,” said Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation commissioner Shravan Hardikar, speaking today to India’s The Economic Times.

But as effective as the utilisation of smart cities appears to be (it took 21 days for the number of coronavirus cases in Pimpri-Chinchwad to double from 12), the ramping up and expansion of smart city capabilities raises some serious questions for the post-coronavirus future. Because after having developed the capacity to monitor individual and group movements, as well as the ability to trace our contacts, what’s to stop governments from using such capacities to monitor us all under more normal circumstances? What’s to stop them from using smart city technology to monitor and suppress protests and political dissidents?

Already, figures such as Edward Snowden have warned that the coronavirus pandemic could end up giving governments invasive new surveillance and data gathering powers. Speaking via video-link at the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, Snowden suggested that new powers may remain in place after the pandemic has subsided.

“Five years later the coronavirus is gone, this data’s still available to them–they start looking for new things,” Snowden said. “They already know what you’re looking at on the internet, they already know where your phone is moving, now they know what your heart rate is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to them?”

Last week, Apple and Google announced that they’re collaborating on a contact-tracing app. Meanwhile, countries such as the US, Singapore, France, China, and the UK are developing or deploying similar apps. So when combined with the emergence of smart cities capable of monitoring our movements, the long-term implications of the coronavirus pandemic for privacy and civil liberties becomes deeply worrying.

Soon enough, a significant number of nations will be harnessing smart technology to monitor vehicle and pedestrian traffic, to check whether we’re observing social distancing rules, and to trace our contacts. And after the pandemic, such technology could end up being used to monitor and nudge human behaviour in general. Needless to say, those doing the monitoring and nudging may not always have our best interests at heart.

Governments–for example, the South Korean government–have offered assurances that the smart technology being rolled out will be used only during the coronavirus outbreak. However, assurances are not legal guarantees, and it’s hard to image governments giving up new surveillance capabilities without them facing massive opposition and protest. This is particularly the case when the pre-existing surveillance activities of, for example, Britain’s GCHQ have already been found to violate human rights, yet little has been done in response to curb such activities.

However, while there are dangers, Newcastle University’s Luke Smith suggests that certain technologies will be safer than others.

“I think we should be quite relaxed about anonymous and aggregate transport statistics,” he tells me. “I’d like to see a more coherent national transport data strategy post-pandemic, where high-level data on the origins and destinations of journeys across all modes of transport are published as routine.”

Smith notes that this could require legislation to be conducted at national levels, but that it would be feasible, since much of the necessary data is already out there. That said, he does affirm that technology used to monitor individual movements should be treated with a healthy dose of caution.

“There are serious risks associated with tracking individual movements,” he says. “As the mobility reports released by Google show, mobile phone data can characterise the purpose of journeys in addition to volumes. As anyone that uses location services has probably noticed, it isn’t always accurate.”

As Smith adds, what’s needed is for a serious debate and discourse on data collection to take place once the coronavirus pandemic has ended. Indeed, because if we don’t have such a debate, we may end up replacing an overt health crisis with a more insidious privacy and civil liberties crisis.

Read the article here: How Smart Cities Are Protecting Against Coronavirus But Threatening Privacy

Pandemics have always shaped cities – and from increased surveillance to ‘de-densification’ to new community activism, Covid-19 is doing it already

Victoria Embankment, which runs for a mile and a quarter along the River Thames, is many people’s idea of quintessential London. Some of the earliest postcards sent in Britain depicted its broad promenades and resplendent gardens. The Metropolitan Board of Works, which oversaw its construction, hailed it as an “appropriate, and appropriately civilised, cityscape for a prosperous commercial society”.

But the embankment, now hardwired into our urban consciousness, is entirely the product of pandemic. Without a series of devastating global cholera outbreaks in the 19th century – including one in London in the early 1850s that claimed more than 10,000 lives – the need for a new, modern sewerage system may never have been identified. Joseph Bazalgette’s remarkable feat of civil engineering, which was designed to carry waste water safely downriver and away from drinking supplies, would never have materialised.

From the Athens plague in 430BC, which drove profound changes in the city’s laws and identity, to the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which transformed the balance of class power in European societies, to the recent spate of Ebola epidemics across sub-Saharan Africa that illuminated the growing interconnectedness of today’s hyper-globalised cities, public health crises rarely fail to leave their mark on a metropolis.

As the world continues to fight the rapid spread of coronavirus, confining many people to their homes and radically altering the way we move through, work in and think about our cities, some are wondering which of these adjustments will endure beyond the end of the pandemic, and what life might look like on the other side.

One of the most pressing questions that urban planners will face is the apparent tension between densification – the push towards cities becoming more concentrated, which is seen as essential to improving environmental sustainability – and disaggregation, the separating out of populations, which is one of the key tools currently being used to hold back infection transmission.

“At the moment we are reducing density everywhere we can, and for good reason,” observes Richard Sennett, a professor of urban studies at MIT and senior adviser to the UN on its climate change and cities programme. “But on the whole density is a good thing: denser cities are more energy efficient. So I think in the long term there is going to be a conflict between the competing demands of public health and the climate.”

Sennett believes that in the future there will be a renewed focus on finding design solutions for individual buildings and wider neighbourhoods that enable people to socialise without being packed “sardine-like” into compressed restaurants, bars and clubs – although, given the incredibly high cost of land in big cities like New York and Hong Kong, success here may depend on significant economic reforms as well.

In recent years, although cities in the global south are continuing to grow as a result of inward rural migration, northern cities are trending in the opposite direction, with more affluent residents taking advantage of remote working capabilities and moving to smaller towns and countryside settlements offering cheaper property and a higher quality of life.

The “declining cost of distance”, as Karen Harris, the managing director of Bain consultancy’s Macro Trends Group, calls it, is likely to accelerate as a result of the coronavirus crisis. More companies are establishing systems that enable staff to work from home, and more workers are getting accustomed to it. “These are habits that are likely to persist,” Harris says.

The implications for big cities are immense. If proximity to one’s job is no longer a significant factor in deciding where to live, for example, then the appeal of the suburbs wanes; we could be heading towards a world in which existing city centres and far-flung “new villages” rise in prominence, while traditional commuter belts fade away.

Another potential impact of coronavirus may be an intensification of digital infrastructure in our cities. South Korea, one of the countries worst-affected by the disease, has also posted some of the lowest mortality rates, an achievement that can be traced in part to a series of technological innovations – including, controversially, the mapping and publication of infected patients’ movements.

In China, authorities have enlisted the help of tech firms such as Alibaba and Tencent to track the spread of Covid-19 and are using “big data” analysis to anticipate where transmission clusters will emerge next. If one of the government takeaways from coronavirus is that “smart cities” including Songdo or Shenzhen are safer cities from a public health perspective, then we can expect greater efforts to digitally capture and record our behaviour in urban areas – and fiercer debates over the power such surveillance hands to corporations and states.

Indeed, the spectre of creeping authoritarianism – as emergency disaster measures become normalised, or even permanent – should be at the forefront of our minds, says Sennett. “If you go back through history and look at the regulations brought in to control cities at times of crisis, from the French revolution to 9/11 in the US, many of them took years or even centuries to unravel,” he says.

At a time of heightened ethnonationalism on the global stage, in which rightwing populists have assumed elected office in many countries from Brazil to the US, Hungary and India, one consequence of coronavirus could be an entrenchment of exclusionary political narratives, calling for new borders to be placed around urban communities – overseen by leaders who have the legal and technological capacity, and the political will, to build them.

In the past, after a widespread medical emergency, Jewish communities and other socially stigmatised groups such as those affected by leprosy have borne the brunt of public anger. References to the “China virus” by Donald Trump suggest such grim scapegoating is likely to be a feature of this pandemic’s aftermath as well.

On the ground, however, the story of coronavirus in many global cities has so far been very different. After decades of increasing atomisation, particularly among younger urban residents for whom the impossible cost of housing has made life both precarious and transient, the sudden proliferation of mutual aid groups – designed to provide community support for the most vulnerable during isolation – has brought neighbours together across age groups and demographic divides. Social distancing has, ironically, drawn some of us closer than ever before. Whether such groups survive beyond the end of coronavirus to have a meaningful impact on our urban future depends, in part, on what sort of political lessons we learn from the crisis.

The vulnerability of many fellow city dwellers – not just because of a temporary medical emergency but as an ongoing lived reality – has been thrown into sharp relief, from elderly people lacking sufficient social care to the low-paid and self-employed who have no financial buffer to fall back on, but upon whose work we all rely.

A stronger sense of society as a collective whole, rather than an agglomeration of fragmented individuals, could lead to a long-term increase in public demands for more interventionist measures to protect citizens – a development that governments may find harder to resist given their readiness in the midst of coronavirus to override the primacy of markets.

Private hospitals are already facing pressure to open up their beds without extra charge for those in need; in Los Angeles, homeless citizens have seized vacant homes, drawing support from some lawmakers. Will these kinds of sentiments dwindle with the passing of coronavirus, or will political support for urban policies that put community interests ahead of corporate ones – like a greater imposition of rent controls – endure?

We don’t yet know the answer, but in the new and unpredictable connections swiftly being forged within our cities as a result of the pandemic, there is perhaps some cause for optimism. “You can’t ‘unknow’ people,” observes Harris, “and usually that’s a good thing.” Sennett thinks we are potentially seeing a fundamental shift in urban social relations. “City residents are becoming aware of desires that they didn’t realise they had before,” he says, “which is for more human contact, for links to people who are unlike themselves.” Whether that change in the nature of city living proves to be as lasting as Bazalgette’s sewer-pipe embankment remains, for now, to be seen.

Read the article here: Cities after coronavirus: How Covid-19 could radically alter urban life

Internet of things (IoT)-based technologies and systems could completely change operations in arable farming, suggests a review of their current and potential applications, implementation challenges and solutions.

With growing arable land scarcity due to a range of human and climatic factors amid rising global demand for food, the need for sustainable and productive farm management is becoming ever more pressing. To address such issues, IoT is seen as a powerful tool, thanks to its potential to make agriculture more data-driven. This will lead to timely, cost-effective, efficient farming systems while also tackling environmental impacts. 

Precision agriculture solutions that are increasingly deployed involve management practices based on spatial measurements using global positioning system signals. For example, with the help of precision farming, fertilisers could be applied only where needed. Smart farming, also called Agriculture 4.0 is developing beyond these applications, enhancing the use of spatial data with real-time events. Farmers can quickly respond to any significant change in weather, humidity and air quality, as well as the health of each crop or soil in the field with such systems where sensors, smart agriculture vehicles, drones and autonomous robots are used. In these applications, IoT eases documentation and supervision of different activities, as well as the traceability of products with data analytics, visualisation and management systems. Despite such advantages, IoT use in arable farming poses several challenges caused by farm size, more frequent use of vehicles, excessive data and highly variable conditions. 

Supported by the EU-funded IoF2020 project, a team of researchers has examined these issues and identified possible solutions. The team’s findings were published in the journal ‘Biosystems Engineering’. “Current issues such as smart phones, intelligent management of Wireless Sensor Networks, middleware platforms, integrated Farm Management Information Systems across the supply chain, or autonomous vehicles and robotics stand out because of their potential to lead arable farming to smart arable farming.” 

The study adds: “During the implementation, different challenges are encountered, and here interoperability is a key major hurdle throughout all the layers in the architecture of an Internet of Things system, which can be addressed by shared standards and protocols. Challenges such as affordability, device power consumption, network latency, Big Data analysis, data privacy and security, among others, have been identified by the articles reviewed and are discussed in detail.”

IoT for large and small producers

The solutions proposed in the study focus on technologies like machine learning, middleware platforms and intelligent data management. The researchers conclude: “Technology developers need to ensure that the solutions create a real benefit for farmers and are available and applicable for both large and small producers.”

The IoF2020 (Internet of Food and Farm 2020) project that supported the study explores the potential of IoT technologies for the European food and farming industry. Now in its final year, trials cover arable crops, dairy, fruits, vegetables and meat sectors, spanning a wide range of use cases in several EU countries.

Read the article here: Unleashing the full potential of smart agriculture

As the world of production face a perfect storm wrought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), the accelerating climate emergency, raising trade tensions and growing economic uncertainty, manufacturers must develop new capabilities and adapt. The companies best positioned to successfully navigate this storm are those that embrace advanced manufacturing technologies and solutions across their factories and supply chains, creating value and improving operations while also increasing sustainability. These companies can offer valuable lessons to those at risk of falling behind.

The need for vision and leadership in the manufacturing sector is clear: More than 70% of companies are struggling to adopt technology effectively, with their efforts to respond to the 4IR stuck in what we call “pilot purgatory”, the attempt to implement new technological solutions without realizing the expected returns on investment or improvements in efficiency.

To address this, the World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network, in collaboration with McKinsey & Company, has identified and brought together 44 of the most advanced factories in the world that are showing leadership in applying advanced manufacturing technologies, including AI, the internet of things and big data analytics, to drive financial and operational impact at scale and transform value chains end-to-end.

A new report outlines several key lessons from this community that can help the industry thrive in the 4IR:

Ensure technology solutions can scale and evolve

To succeed in the rapidly changing landscape of the 4IR, factories must operate in a new way. That requires a strong focus on identifying problems and then creating solutions that go beyond adding incremental tools to existing processes. Factories that create new operating systems that incorporate combinations of technology in an agile approach to continuous iteration can create new ways to not only improve efficiency but also scale new solutions across the entire company.

For example, Fast Radius in the US created an analytics platform that captures data in the manufacturing process using sensors and applies machine learning to provide feedback, allowing workers to more quickly improve design and address any issues. This has led to a 36% inventory reduction and a 90% reduction in the time it takes to get products to market.

At SAIC Maxus in China, the company developed a web app to enable customers to customize and place orders and then track the production status. The company uses 3D and digital twin design, which uses a digital version to represent the physical asset, to configure and produce the cars, and then applies an automated smart engineering system and an AI quality assurance tool to check and identify errors. This has led to shorter time to market, 35%, and increased accuracy, 99.8%.

Optimize efficiency to drive sustainability

Manufacturing represents 54% of the world’s energy consumption and is responsible for 20% of global emissions. Increases in efficiency driven by technology can help reduce materials consumption and CO2 emissions.

Henkel in Düsseldorf, Germany, has developed a unique cloud-based data platform that connects more than 30 sites and more than 10 distribution centres in real time. This helps to meet growing customer and consumer expectations on service and sustainability, while achieving double-digit cost and inventory reductions.

Unilever has reduced its material waste by more than 40% in their Dubai, UAE, factory by digitally enabling end-to-end quality management. This was driven by a local entrepreneurial team with limited investment and in a short time period.

Focus on reskilling and enabling workers

Any technological solution must consider the effects on workers and put people first. Manufacturing leaders in the 4IR leverage internal and external expertise to reskill their workforce, making sure their teams receive continuous capability building, guidance and training.

This involves empowering workers to innovate with technology, managing talent development and implementing new ways of working. Some examples of effective learning methods are offering a gamification of new skills, applying virtual or augmented reality and delivering real-time work instructions via digital platforms.

For example, Ford Otosan in Turkey developed a “Talent Development Agile” team, made up of HR, manufacturing and vocational training to help employees develop their innovation, data and creativity skills. Schneider Electric runs “Digital Weeks” consisting of a hackathon used to generate new ideas and include workers in leading the company’s digital transformation. Phoenix Contact in Germany has built an application that guides operators through their jobs and tracks accomplishment, giving them more time for managing and trouble-shooting and helping them demonstrate their success.

Create a shared learning journey

The manufacturing sector can only realize the full benefits of the 4IR if there is a complete transformation across value chains and production systems. Leaders in this space should support the diffusion of technology through their entire production networks, lifting up SMEs to improve overall results. This shared learning journey can lead to not only a return on investment but also a more inclusive distribution of knowledge, which can accelerate innovation across the industry.

Bringing companies together to share best practices and develop new approaches to future success is a key goal of the Global Lighthouse Network. Only together can we transform the manufacturing ecosystem to thrive in a digital world and lead a sustainable revolution.

This article is related to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 21-24 January 2020.

Read the article here: How factories of the future are leading the way to innovation in manufacturing

IoT projects will slow down and cities will have to decide if 5G is best for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, IDC says.

Over the next decade of smart cities work, there will be fewer IoT projects, more citizen input, and more communication between cars and infrastructure, according to the smart cities team at IDC.

City leaders will build digital trust in new technology by setting clear data-use policies as the first step in the technology procurement process.

Although climate change did not appear on the predictions list, Ruthbea Yesner, vice president worldwide government insights at IDC, said it is a huge driver of smart city work.

“Cities are looking at how anything from communications to technology can build community resilience and help them respond and adapt to this changing environment,” Yesner said.

IDC predicts that by 2023 cities and governments will spend $196 billion globally on smart cities work. The biggest spending categories are fixed visual surveillance, public transportation, and smart lighting.

IDC’s 10 predictions for smart cities work in 2020 fall into five main buckets:

• Public safety
• Data use
• Talent issues
• Digital trust
• Macroeconomic impact of technology

The full list is below. The IDC smart cities team discussed predictions 1, 3, 4, and 10 during a recent webinar.

Roadblocks to IoT success

IDC’s predictions start out with a stark description of the challenges many city leaders face with IoT projects: In 2020, 10% to 30% of IoT will fail to launch or scale due to weak performance metrics, poor understanding of products, and lack of funding.

Yesner said that IDC has found that more than 35% of cities have deployed an IoT project while 12% said they had developed but not launched it.

In a survey, city leaders said IoT projects stalled or died because of lack of internal skills, limited budgets, and a lack of understanding of the technology’s benefits. Yesner said there are many roadblocks to success, including a lack of staff and resources.

“Some of these didn’t meet expectations because the outcomes were too broad or not measurable,” she said.

Yesner said that assumptions often didn’t match the reality of how cities work. One example of expectations not matching results is a popular project of converting incandescent street lights to LEDs. Yesner said that because many U.S. cities pay a flat fee for electricity, officials did not see a cost savings for using less electricity.

“You see energy savings from the conversion but you don’t get benefits from programmability and dimming because you’re not adjusting costs based on metered energy,” she said.

Yesner also said that many products from vendors are untested, immature, and oversold.

In a related IoT prediction, IDC thinks that by 2023, 20% of cybersecurity incidents will stem from Smart City IoT device deployments, which will lead to double-digit increases in cybersecurity software and staff training budgets.

Cities need a sensor strategy that addresses use cases, data protection and physical and cybersecurity plans, she said.

More data ethics policies

Alison Brooks, an IDC research vice president for smart cities and communities, said that cities will respond to increasing skepticism around surveillance technology by establishing clear data use policies.

In No. 3, IDC predicts that 75% of next-gen public safety technology procurements will have specifications preemptively scoped by strict policy frameworks. Prediction No. 4 addresses data policies.

Brooks said that residents mostly accept “intelligence everywhere” data collection in a consumer capacity, but not when the state adopts a similar approach. She said that privacy advocates are concerned with the increasingly broad surveillance of citiezen’s daily activities and potential misuse of biometric data.

“This includes social media monitoring, predictive policing, cell-site simulators, automatic number plate recognition, drones, and gun detection,” Brooks said.

To respond to these concerns, cities will start to develop “carefully worded and strictly scoped policy frameworks that delineate acceptable use.” Setting data-use policies should be the first step in the tech purchasing process.

“Policy is going to have to precede tech procurement and IT will have to work with more stakeholders to de-risk implementation,” she said. “Agencies will need to keep project objectives very simple, restricted and measurable.”

Yesner said that cities have to build community engagement into every project to ensure ultimate success and even funding.

“If you’re going out to a bond to pay for this work, part of the funding process becomes engaging and educating the community,” Yesner said.

5G vs. DSRC for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication

IDC’s prediction No. 10 highlights a challenge cities face in making it easy for cars and trucks to communicate with city infrastructure like stop lights, crosswalks, and stop signs.

A few years ago when municipalities started investing in vehicle-to-infrastructure technology (V2I), dedicated short-range communications was a viable choice. Now that 5G is becoming more available, cities are now stuck in the middle of the debate between two standards.

Max Claps, research director of IDC government insights, said that some automakers are split with some using 5G technology—BMW, Mercedes, and Ford— while others including GM and Volkswagen using DSRC.

IDC predicts that by 2025, 25% of major cities worldwide will have picked one standard or the other and installed V2I infrastructure.

“We recommend that cities work closely with regulators and car manufacturers to make sure the eventual road map minimizes the cost of investment,” Claps said.

He said that cities also need to take into account how will services, storage, and apps will need to scale over time.

“Vehicle to infrastructure connectivity is only as good as the data and the content that is transmitted over endpoint to endpoint exchanges,” he said.

Another IDC 5G prediction is that by 2024 75% of all large cities will use 5G to scale key services including real-time crime centers, V2I connectivity, and smart stadiums.

IDC Worldwide Smart Cities and Communities: 2020 Predictions 

1: In 2020, 10%–30% of Smart City IoT projects will fail to launch or scale due to ill-defined outcomes or KPIs, poor understanding of vendor offerings, and/or inadequate funding and stakeholder engagement.

2: By 2021, 20% of cities will use composite indexes to assess the value of initiatives, such as predictive policing, mobility as a service, and personalized care.

3: By 2021, in response to pressure from citizens and advocacy groups, 75% of next-gen public safety technology procurements will have specifications preemptively scoped by strict policy frameworks.

4: By 2022, 50% of large cities will develop data ethics policies that define how and what data can be collected, used, and shared.

5: By 2023, 25% of successful Smart Cities digital twin platforms will be used to automate processes for increasingly complex, interconnected ecosystems of assets and products.

6: By 2023, 20% of cybersecurity incidents will stem from Smart City IoT device deployments, forcing double-digit increases in cybersecurity software and staff training budgets.

7: By 2024, 90% of greenfield cities and 20% of existing cities globally will adopt digital space planning capabilities and new zoning regulations to realize the benefits of the growing sharing economy.

8: By 2024, 70% of city data scientist jobs will be unfilled, resulting in increased investment in robotic process automation and AI-native systems, which will exponentially grow data capabilities without adding headcount.

9: By 2024, one-third of all Smart Cities use cases will be impacted by 5G, and 75% of large cities will use 5G to scale key services such as real-time crime centers, V2I connectivity, and smart stadiums.

10: By 2025, 25% of major cities worldwide will have installed connected vehicle infrastructure using either 5G or DSRC as countries and regions settle on one standard or the other.

Read the article here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-predictions-for-smart-city-priorities-in-2020/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=29093001945884924449183221558090

The idea of smart cities was not on anyone’s radar back in 2005, but New Orleans got a head start on data-driven decision making thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

After Katrina hit and the city’s levees failed, the city started using data to improve and speed-up decision making to support the city’s recovery.

Amsterdam was another early adopter with the Amsterdam Smart Cities Initiative in 2009. The team used data to address depression and increase treatment for people who were not getting help. By combining statistics from insurance companies and information about the cost of treatment for depression, the project team found hot spots in the city where people with depression were not receiving appropriate care.

Steph Stoppenhagen, director of smart cities business development solutions at Black & Veatch, said that public private partnerships (P3s) are an effective way to make smart city projects successful.

“That’s where you create those P3s to build a consortium and do this project that way,” she said.

Stoppenhagen said that smart campuses are a growing trend in P3 smart city projects. Sprint recently announced a smart campus project with Arizona State University to take advantage of 5G service. Sprint is working with the university and the Greater Phoenix Smart Region Consortium to create a Sprint 5G incubator at ASU’s Novus Innovation Corridor and conduct joint research and development.

This look back at smart city projects over the last decade highlights what worked and what didn’t.

Successful smart city work

There are many ways to measure what makes a city smart.

IDC is taking nominations for its second annual Smart Cities awards program with 12 categories. In the first round of awards, Albany, NY, won the smart water category and NYCx Co-Labs in Brownsville, Brooklyn, won for digital equity and accessibility.

Easy Park’s second Smart Cities Index scored 500 cities across 24 criteria that cover everything from recycling to blockchain. Vienna won a 10 for trash management and San Francisco got the top mark for blockchain.

In 2017, the What Works Cities division of Bloomberg Philanthropies launched a certification process to evaluate how well cities use data to improve the quality of life for residents. So far, 13 cities have won a gold or a silver certification with two honorable mentions:

• Arlington, TX – Silver in 2019
• Boston, MA – Silver in 2018
• Kansas City, MO – Gold in 2019 and Silver in 2018
• Los Angeles – Gold in 2018
• Louisville, KY – Gold in 2019 and Silver in 2018
• Memphis, TN – Silver in 2019
• New Orleans, LA – Silver in 2018
• Philadelphia, PA – Silver in 2019
• San Diego, CA – Silver in 2018
• San Francisco, CA – Silver in 2018
• Scottsdale, AZ – Silverin 2019
• Seattle, WA – Silver in 2018
• Washington, DC – Gold in 2019 and Silver in 2018

The certification review process has 45 criteria in eight categories:

• Data Governance
• Evaluations
• General Management
• Open Data
• Performance & Analytics
• Repurposing
• Results-Driven Contracting
• Stakeholder Engagement

Louisville won for building an open-source, cloud-based system Waze Analytics Relational-database Platform (Waze WARP). The platform uses WAZE data, collision reports, and built-environment data to conduct real-time traffic studies. More than 900 government entities are now using this platform to run both historic and real-time querying and analysis to improve mobility, pedestrian and bike safety, road conditions, and emergency response.

Washington, DC’s Right Care, Right Now pilot project was designed to route 911 callers to the right kind of help. Operators now transfers callers with non-life-threatening conditions to an EMS-trained nurse, who determines the most appropriate services. The nurse can schedule a same-day appointment at an urgent or primary care facility and coordinates transportation through Lyft.

Earlier this year, Kansas City passed an ordinance to ensure its commitment to data-driven governance and protect the city’s priorities around transparency. One challenge for smart city work is ensuring that data transparency and access survives the transition to a new mayor.

Low points 

American cities faced unintended consequence as a result of one data-driven idea. To improve public transportation in low-income communities, cities started building apartments and condos near transit stops to accomplish this.

Instead of expanding educational and employment opportunities, these developments encouraged gentrification and pushed out the same people the project was designed to help. These new developments often raised rents in poor neighborhoods and priced out the people the transit expansions were meant to serve.

The San Diego Union Tribune studied the developments in four California cities where about 400 multifamily buildings were completed or under construction within a half mile of a transit stop.

In neighborhoods where most families made less than $64,000 a year, the newspaper analysis found that monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment was more than $3,500. In some areas where median household income was less than $30,000, the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment is still more than $3,300.

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs led one of the biggest smart city fails in the last decade with Sidewalk Toronto. After several years of discussions, Google released ambitious plans in June 2019 to build residential, retail, and office buildings on Toronto’s waterfront.

The project included public Wi-Fi, in addition to other sensors to collect “urban data” to better inform housing and traffic decisions. By October, Sidewalk Toronto leaders had scaled back their plans due to complaints and questions from residents.

Stoppenhagen said the Sidewalks team had great intentions in Toronto but they didn’t have residents and neighborhood organizations at the table.

“This has a bunch of us learning a lot of lessons out there of always bringing the community to the table to make sure they are aligned with the plan so it doesn’t all blow up in smoke,” she said.

Stoppenhagen added that one of the biggest challenges that cities face is addressing privacy concerns.

“We need a better educational plan to explain why we want to use this data and how that will affect someone in the future to their advantage,” she said. “We need to show some use cases back to the public.”

Community engagement is critical

Bas Boorsma, vice president at Cities Today Institute, has a list of 10 why reasons smart cities projects fail and technology myopia and solutionism are at the top of the list. City leaders fall into these traps when the goal is to implement a new technology instead of using tech to solve a city problem.

This mistake is often a result of a related problem—not talking to residents who are most interested in quality of life issues, like access to an internet connection and potholes. Stoppenhagen said this is the frame of reference she uses for smart city projects.

“When I think smart cities, it means more time back to that citizen, how can we be more efficient and give someone back more time?” she said.

In a column about smart city projects, Kendra L. Smith, the associate director of community engagement in the Center for Population Health Sciences at Stanford University, said smart cities leaders must embrace non-digital issues such as “legacy governance, social justice, politics, ideology, privacy and financial elements that are not so smart, efficient or resilient when smart-city planning starts.”

Smith wrote that to succeed and be relevant to residents, city leaders must answer these questions about smart city projects:

1. Who decides what the city really needs and will operate going forward?
2. What does it really cost to develop a smart city?
3. How will a smart city affect social justice in my city?

The key is to make sure digital goals can withstand the real-world reality check from residents and long-standing city operations.

Read the article here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/a-decade-of-smart-city-projects-what-worked-and-what-didnt/

At this year’s Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft has announced several new features in Azure to accelerate the development and success of smart city solutions.

According to a recent blogpost by Anthony Salcito, interim vice president of public sector at Microsoft, the firm is focusing heavily “to empower cities with the tools they need to engage and connect with their citizens, modernise the government workplace, enhance government and city services, and help improve security.”

Many of the new updates involve Azure Maps. For instance, the cloud solution now uses weather services to give cities an easy way to integrate real-time weather data into their applications. It also integrates with mobility-as-a-service company Moovit and visual assistance app Aira to make public transport more accessible to blind or low-vision users.

Microsoft has also made Azure Maps available on the Azure Government Cloud enabling US government agencies and cities to use geospatial and location intelligence capabilities in their cloud solutions for smart mobility, public safety, emergency management and more.

The Azure internet of things team at Microsoft also recently released 11 new industry app templates to showcase the types of solutions that the firm’s customers and partners can build, including water quality monitoring, water consumption monitoring and connected waste management.

Read the article here: https://www.technologyrecord.com/Article/microsoft-announces-new-azure-features-at-smart-city-expo-2019-88413

Smart cities are going to have to put the people living there first if they’re hoping to innovate.

Smart cities are the future, but as modern infrastructure advances, it’s finding itself at a crossroads with the actual people that live there.

Modern cities are facing a wealth of problems, from climate change to housing costs to traffic to unemployment. Historically these issues have been tackled using politics and community incentives, but now, they’re being tackled with new smart city tech. Things like ride-sharing or home-sharing, connected public transport, et cetera.

All this integrated tech needs to be embraced by the people of the city though, which means that building the next generation of smart cities is going to take a massive amount of cooperation.

The Future of Smart Cities

As technology gets more capable to solve cities’ problems, there will be rising potential for conflict between this technology and the people it’s trying desperately to help. Issues like privacy and shared spaces and communal tech will arise. Believe it or not, people tend to not always agree on things, especially how technology should fit into their lives.

Civic leaders vying to create the next smart city and utilize technology to overcome the growing challenges of cities will need to minimize the damage of tech and maximize the benefits. This means transparency in tech, public engagement in the implementation process, and data privacy.

Transparency in Technology

The general public tends to be resistant to large corporations developing plans behind closed doors on how to implement technology in their city. Populations of cities tend to think of the public infrastructure as an extension of their home. So, when a technology company comes in and tries to “revolutionize” the city without explaining themselves well enough, the public can turn.

This represents a growing awareness of the general public to invasive technology. As society has become aware of just how dangerous technology can be, we’ve become more resistant to new technology that we’re not fully sure about. Gone are the days where people would wish the future into the present on a whim.

Data Privacy

Data, data, data. People more than ever recognize that having access and control over your own data is vital to maintaining security over your own information. People are generally fearful of a surveillance state, so as cities begin to roll out new technology, the general public will be resistant to “big brother” watching through the tech.

Smart cities will have to work to establish an aura of safety and security between the technology and the people living there if they want true mutual adoption.

There’s also a decent amount of ethics that will come into play in the implementation of smart cities and managing their data. We’ve already seen the banning of facial recognition software to ease residents’ concerns as it presents a slippery slope of bad actors.

Public Engagement in the Technology

The private sector is here to grow their own economy and create jobs, but the public sector is here for guidance and accountability. As the public and private sectors merge to create futuristic smart cities, keeping the accountability of the public sector at the forefront will be paramount to a projects’ success.

One key element that can ease friction between these two sectors is to have a mission-oriented project. Smart city projects that are focused on solving a core issue in a way that meets the needs of the city generally allow for greater public engagement and thus the adoption is eased.

Across these three core principles to implementing smart city tech is the idea of bettering human life through technology. So what cities are already on the right path?

Cities That are Getting it Right

Copenhagen

Copenhagen won the World Smart Cities award in 2014 for a project that used wireless data from phones merged with GPS signals to meet green initiatives city-wide. The project collected data about how people across the city moved with the goal of optimizing the flow of traffic throughout the city. In the end, it promised a 10 percent reduction of travel time for residents and a huge economic benefit as a result of these new efficiencies.

Singapore

Leaders in Singapore have created an initiative that involves a number of apps that give citizens a greater connection to the public services around them . Through the aggregagtion of data and community involved hackathons, the city has been able to improve efficiency in how the city runs all the while soliciting even greater community engagement.

Dubai

Dubai’s smart city initiative is goaled at measuring and improving the happiness of the citizens directly through integrated technology. The Government uses a “Happiness Meter” that is updated in realtime by citizens’ feedback during interactions with the city. This ultimately gives the decision-makers of the city an up to date model of how they’re doing and what they might need to improve upon. This is one way that new smart city tech can directly improve the lives of the people who live there.

Read the article here: https://interestingengineering.com/smart-cities-will-need-to-put-people-first-not-technology-in-order-to-survive