The future of the way we live in and use our homes is set to be one thing: Smart. From the fridge to your toilet seat, your Smart Home will be one of the integrated appliances and furniture.

The following 11+ devices and innovations will likely change the way we live forever. This list is far from exhaustive and in no particular order.

1. Tunable lighting’s white lighting can change your mood

Studies have shown for a long time that lighting directly affects occupants’ moods. Bluish hues can boost your energy whilst reddish tones tend to calm you down.

Tunable lighting that changes automatically or on-demand could change the way we live and work. Whether in the workplace or at home this might be as effective as listening to different genres of music.

2. This smart home innovation is bringing “Minority Report” into reality

Many home gadgets and other tech rely heavily on voice command. But it’s not very useful whilst watching your favorite movie or listening to your favorite band’s new album on maximum volume.

Titanium Falcon’s Talon Smart Ring is one such device that combines smart home control with jewelry. It gives you command and control of devices by simply using hand gestures.

3. ‘Smarten up’ your bathroom (or kitchen) with this cool smart home device

At CES 2018, a company called Kohler unveiled its Kohler Konnect. This smart tech effectively acts like Alexa but for your bathroom appliances, as well as your kitchen.

You can, by voice command, make your bathroom effectively hands-free. You can warm up your toilet seat or be alerted when the bath water is at the perfect temperature.

Read the article here: Future of the Smart Home: 11+ Innovations That Could Change the Way We Live

What a time to start a business. Lab and university shutdowns, travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, nervous investors, and social distancing—the novel coronavirus has created a lot of uncertainty. How can scientific entrepreneurs plan and execute what may be the biggest move of their professional lives when no one even knows what next week is going to look like?

The monthly number of deals raising venture capital for young and start-up companies dropped 38% for the two months starting March 4, as compared with the four months before the COVID-19 crisis, according to a recent Harvard Business School study from Sabrina Howell of New York University, Josh Lerner of Harvard University, and colleagues (SSRN 2020, DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3594239). The study has not been peer reviewed.

Most of that decline was in early-stage deals, and the deals that did happen were more cautious. “Venture groups fund less innovative firms during recessions,” the authors write.

That notion is corroborated by reports from companies participating in America’s Seed Fund, a program at the US National Science Foundation that provides grants to scientific start-ups. Senior program director Ben Schrag says a large number of firms in the seed fund’s portfolio have delayed or canceled fundraising rounds, and others have had them go poorly.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that venture capital firms had a record $276 billion of “dry powder”—cash in hand that they were not investing. “It’s not that there’s not money out there,” Schrag says, it’s that investors are waiting for company values to drop so they can get a better deal.

Starting a company based on chemistry is a multiyear endeavor, and few such ventures have the luxury of waiting for the investment climate to thaw. For many firms, seed money is dwindling, but new investors want more data and progress than normal to feel secure putting up capital. It’s scary, with a silver lining. New firms that learn to run lean, develop discipline, and find the right partners can come out of the pandemic stronger than if they’d been born during more normal circumstances.

Ingrid Fung of the agriculture-focused venture capital firm Finistere Ventures says companies in Finistere’s portfolio that started during or just after the 2008 financial crisis are doing well today because they learned to be efficient with money, including by outsourcing some R&D. “They typically have lower burn; they can dial up or dial back,” she says.

C&EN spoke with three chemistry start-ups making big moves in the midst of the pandemic. The leaders at these firms have had to get creative to raise funds, build their teams, and move their products forward, all while keeping up staff morale at a time when it’s harder than ever to make a personal connection.

Read the article here: Starting a science business during a pandemic

Bioactive inks printed on wearable textiles can map conditions over the entire surface of the body

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (June 5, 2020)—Researchers at Tufts University’s School of Engineering have developed biomaterial-based inks that respond to and quantify chemicals released from the body (e.g. in sweat and potentially other biofluids) or in the surrounding environment by changing color. The inks can be screen printed onto textiles such as clothes, shoes, or even face masks in complex patterns and at high resolution, providing a detailed map of human response or exposure. The advance in wearable sensing, reported in Advanced Materials, could simultaneously detect and quantify a wide range of biological conditions, molecules and, possibly, pathogens over the surface of the body using conventional garments and uniforms.

“The use of novel bioactive inks with the very common method of screen printing opens up promising opportunities for the mass-production of soft, wearable fabrics with large numbers of sensors that could be applied to detect a range of conditions,” said Fiorenzo Omenetto, corresponding author and the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts’ School of Engineering. “The fabrics can end up in uniforms for the workplace, sports clothing, or even on furniture and architectural structures.”

Wearable sensing devices have attracted considerable interest in monitoring human performance and health. Many such devices have been invented incorporating electronics in wearable patches, wristbands, and other configurations that monitor either localized or overall physiological information such as heart rate or blood glucose. The research presented by the Tufts team takes a different, complementary approach – non-electronic, colorimetric detection of a theoretically very large number of analytes using sensing garments that can be distributed to cover very large areas: anything from a patch to the entire body, and beyond.

The components that make the sensing garments possible are biologically activated silk-based inks. The soluble silk substrate in these ink formulations can be modified by embedding various “reporter” molecules – such as pH sensitive indicators, or enzymes like lactate oxidase to indicate levels of lactate in sweat. The former could be an indicator of skin health or dehydration, while the latter could indicate levels of fatigue of the wearer. Many other derivatives of the inks can be created due to the versatility of the silk fibroin protein by modifying it with active molecules such as chemically sensitive dyes, enzymes, antibodies and more. While the reporter molecules could be unstable on their own, they can become shelf-stable when embedded within the silk fibroin in the ink formulation.

The inks are formulated for screen printing applications by combining with a thickener (sodium alginate) and a plasticizer (glycerol). The screen printable bio-inks can be used like any ink developed for screen printing, and so can be applied not just to clothing but also to various surfaces such as wood, plastics and paper to generate patterns ranging from hundreds of microns to tens of meters. While the changes in color presented by the inks can provide a visual cue to the presence or absence of an analyte, use of camera imaging analysis scanning the garments or other material can gather more precise information on both quantity and high resolution, sub-millimeter mapping.

The technology builds upon earlier work by the same researchers developing bioactive silk inks formulated for inkjet-printing to create petri dishes, paper sensors, and laboratory gloves that can indicate bacterial contamination by changing colors.

“The screen printing approach provides the equivalent of having a large, multiplexed arrangement of sensors covering extensive areas of the body, if worn as a garment, or even on large surfaces such as room interiors,” said Giusy Matzeu, research assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts School of Engineering and first author of the paper. “Coupled with image analysis, we can obtain a high resolution map of color reactions over a large area and gain more insight on overall physiological or environmental state. In theory, we could extend this method to track air quality, or support environmental monitoring for epidemiology.”

The fact that the method uses common printing techniques also opens up avenues in creative applications – something explored by Laia Mogas-Soldevila, architect and recent PhD graduate at Tufts in Omenetto’s SilkLab. Mogas-Soldevila has helped to create beautiful tapestries, displaying them in museums across the United States and Europe.  The displays are interactive, allowing visitors to spray different, non-toxic chemicals onto the fabric and watch the patterns transform. “This is really a great example of how art and engineering can gain from and inspire each other,” said Mogas-Soldevila. “The engineered inks open up a new dimension in responsive, interactive tapestries and surfaces, while the 1,000-year old art of screen printing has provided a foundation well suited to the need for a modern high resolution, wearable sensing surface.”

Read the article here: New smart fabrics with bioactive inks monitor body and environment by changing color

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fuse Technology Group Inc. recognized it would need a solution for monitoring symptoms of employees, many of whom work on software products for essential companies.

So the Ferndale, Mich.-based software developer made its own, and is rolling out that software to its clients and others plotting strategies for returning to work and figuring out how to best mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

As companies express interest in the product, Fuse looks at the regulations of the state and local governments where the business is located and tailors the software to those needs, said Kevin Gravier, director of programming services at Fuse Technology.

“It’s a very generic solution for small and medium-size businesses that were planning to launch with paper,” said Gravier, adding that it’s intended to offer “peace of mind” to businesses as they reengage their workforces.

Fuse Technology is one of many companies in a rush to create a digital solution as health screenings, in which questions are asked related to symptoms and interactions with sick people, become part of a new normal.

Using software aims to answer questions from employers when it comes to collection of workers’ health data and practical matters like who should be responsible for taking temperatures.

Beyond health screenings, new guidance drafted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday would give different organizations specifics about how to reopen while still limiting spread of the virus, including by spacing workers or students 6 feet apart and closing break rooms and cafeterias to limit gatherings. Many of the suggestions already appear on federal websites but haven’t been presented as reopening advice.

Fuse Technology has joined what has become a crowded marketplace of technology suppliers in just a matter of weeks.

Red Level Group, a Novi, Mich.-based IT services and application development company, this month launched COVID ClearPass, an app that requires employees to give health declarations.

Similarly, Quicken Loans Inc., the Detroit-based online mortgage company, has been developing an application for use by its employees. Should a Quicken Loans worker fail the screening questions, then the employee’s badge is turned off, denying them access to facilities.

Meanwhile, Detroit-based workplace application developer Andonix has its core product, called Smart Work Station, in use by manufacturers. The product aims to allow large manufacturers to move their training materials to an app installed on a new worker’s smartphone.

But with manufacturing having mostly ground to a halt in recent months, the company has pivoted toward a new health screening app called Safely. The company is offering the app for free and has interested clients in manufacturing, construction and professional services.

“We see that the pandemic is going to change our social and work habits in the same way that 9/11 changed the travel industry,” said Andonix CEO David Salazar Yanez.

Implementing new policies

From an employer’s standpoint, daily health screenings account for the first line of defense as the economy slowly reemerges and people head back to work sites.

The Small Business Association of Michigan has identified four so-called pillars around which it is encouraging employers to coalesce. Beyond daily symptom checks and screenings, the group is encouraging that businesses maintain social distancing; a sanitation and disinfecting schedule several times daily; and the use of personal protective equipment.

Each of those items is on the agenda as employees slowly start going back to the Livonia office of Flat Rate Funding Group LLC, a transportation invoicing company.

Because the company works with the trucking industry, it has been deemed essential, and a skeleton crew has been working onsite while most employees work remotely, COO Rob Trube said.

Beginning this week, however, workers will have the option to begin returning to the office, and one of the first things they’ll find is a daily health screening using Andonix’s Safely app. Once employees answer the screening questions, the app generates a QR code that Trube described as akin to a mobile boarding pass used to board an airplane.

Trube said he believed an app would be far more sanitary than using a pen and paper to track health matters.

Ultimately, Trube said that between the health screening and other mitigation steps, it all boils down to a balancing act as employees return to work.

“My challenge has been … how do I make (employees) feel safe and how do I operate the business?” Trube asked, noting that Flat Rate has invested between $1,500 and $2,000 in cleaning supplies and no-touch equipment.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services so far has no specific guidance of its own that it’s offering to employers regarding health screenings, and is instead deferring to the federal CDC guidelines.

The CDC guidance simply refers to health screenings as an “optional strategy” and generally encourages social and physical distancing.

The Marana Group, a Kalamazoo, Mich.-based data and document management firm with an office in South Bend, Ind., has been screening employees since mid-February, company President David Rhoa said.

Despite the months of testing, however, he said he continues to lack a clear sense of just who should be taking temperatures and where that should be done. If an employee shows up and the temperature is deemed excessive, leading to the worker being turned away, were federal privacy laws violated?

“The challenge we have as any small business would, we’re not doctors. Our policy has always been that if you don’t feel well, stay home,” Rhoa said.

“The challenge is that this whole process of screening is not cookie-cutter, and it can’t be. Every business is different and it comes down to the physical location, the number of employees, the shifts they’re trying to run, the nature of the business.”

The data these health checks generate also leads to questions for some, including how is it stored and who has access to it?

Gravier with Fuse Technology said the company’s program simply archives the health data in an encrypted format and provides limited access.

The Kent County Health Department in West Michigan last week announced a new public-private partnership to gather health screening data and use it in furthering efforts to prevent additional spread of the coronavirus, according to a report in MiBiz.

Others see the health screening and gathered data as a competitive advantage as consumers start to venture out more in public and are looking for assurance they’ll be safe.

Leelanau Cellars, a 150-acre vineyard on Northern Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula, closed its tasting room in mid-March as mandated by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. But because the vineyard is in the agriculture sector, which was exempted from Whitmer’s shutdowns, Leelanau Cellars’ 25 employees who work in wine production and distribution have remained on the job, said Bob Jacobson, owner of Leelanau Wine Cellars Ltd.

For the past two months, Jacobson has been accumulating paperwork from employees answering a questionnaire about their current health status. Jacobson has purchased a digital service from Movista, a Bentonville, Ark.-based data company that has converted its employee task-management software into a mobile app-based platform for daily health screenings.

“It makes some sense to try to keep records of all of this stuff because who knows where it’s all going?” he said.

Customers may also want to know that a business is screening employees daily and keeping records, Jacobson said.

“We don’t know what our customers are going to become comfortable with,” he said.

Movista, which has an office in Grand Rapids, sells software primarily to retailers for tracking inventory, employee tasks, time and attendance.

Since the coronavirus outbreak hit, the company has developed a new app for health screenings that it’s marketing to retailers, restaurants, universities and government institutions, said Stan Zylowski, CEO and co-founder of the company.

One of the shortcomings in self-screening apps is a thermometer reading has to be manually added by employees.

“It’s a very ‘Scouts honor’ type system,” Zylowski said.

Movista recommends to customers that they use a “leader-led” system where a company representative takes the reading with a touchless thermometer and inputs the data into its system, which guards privacy by identifying individuals by employee number.

“The challenge with self-reporting is obvious, right?” Zylowski said. “If I as an employee want to make the thermometer hot, I clearly can do that. And if I want someone else to use the thermometer so I can get to go to work, I certainly can do that, too.”

Read the full article here: Beyond the thermometer: Tech companies rush to roll out health screening apps

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