How IoT Drives Smart Infrastructure to Transform Cities

The concept of the IoT was drafted in the 1980s in a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University. That’s right, it was the first Internet-connected machine to check its inventory and if the drinks were cold. As the technologies evolved we saw rapid discoveries in the innovations and Internet of Things are the base of the technology on which all digital businesses rely today. It’s a network that has bloomed from connecting laptops to connecting wearables, cars, smart homes, smart cities and so on.

-Gartner’s Report

The buzz technology ‘Internet of Things’ is enhancing the quality of urban life, has a huge impact on our lifestyle and perhaps the major contributor to the rise of smart cities. It is one of the most powerful applications of IoT which includes smart surveillance, self-moving transportation, smarter energy administration network, water conveyance, urban safety and environmental examination. It’s an ecosystem that includes transmission, applications, data, and analytics to unlatch the competence of the IoT and has certainly made the gadgets around us more smart and intelligent.

Gartner report says, “smart homes and smart commercial buildings grew to represent 45% of total connected things in use in 2015, due to investment and service opportunity and the research firm estimated that the figure will rise to 81% by 2020.” It’s a huge rise!

Smart City Technologies

Having the potential to decode essential muddles, Internet of Things can accelerate the urbanization process by utilizing all smart city technologies. How? Here are the few technologies that are bringing change

• Smart Infrastructure: The smart technology has the ability to examine the larger amount of raw data and convert them into useful information. So, the collected data can help the city to stay alerted for the future uncertainty and plan the city’s sustainable development future well in advance. According to Gartner’s forecast, “about 20%, or 1.39 billion, of IoT units shipped into smart city applications by 2020 will be utilized for sustainability and climate change use cases, especially in transportation and smart buildings, as well as homes.”
• Smart Data: It is the technology that provides quick analyzed data available for public use in the city. It is a digital information that can help citizen to find out free parking place even before the data is sent to an analytics platform to be analyzed. For example, the self-driving car requires immediate analysis by the automobile’s processors and quickly send it to the operator that control the brakes, steering and so on. Here, we can’t have the data sent to an analytics platform and wait for the output.
• Smart Mobility: Smart Mobility help Smart Cities to find sustainable transport options. Director of Principal Engineers, UL, Tom Blewitt said, “mobility refers to both the technology and the data which travels across the technology. The ability to seamlessly move in and out of many different municipal and private systems is essential if we are to realize the promise of smart cities. Building the smart city will never be a project that is “finished.” Technology needs to be interoperable and perform to expectations regardless of who made it or when it was made. Data also needs to be unconstrained as it moves between systems, with all due attention to intellectual property, security and privacy concerns. For this, public policy and legal technology need to be state of the art.”
• Smart Energy: Energy- saving is the major focal point of the smart city. The smart energy technology collects the data and Cisco the research says, the cities that run on the information can improve their energy efficiency by 30 percent within 20 years. By using renewable energy sources, manage water supply and have a waste management system, cities can reduce pollution and use less energy.

IEEE Experiment In Padova

Tools connected to the Internet has a potential to quantify the anonymous and convert them into some practical insights that can boost the comprehensive standard of life. In 2014 there was an experiment conducted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) in the city called Padova. The city’s streets light were connected to the internet through different sensors which help them to watchdog the street lighting, estimate the carbon monoxide levels, air temperature, and humidity.

According to the IEEE report, “the collected data was analyzed to detect anomalies and events that may occur in the monitored area, to profile the user’s behaviors, and to gain insight into the use of city resources, which may serve to optimize or create services for the community.”

Analysis of these results led to a variety of potential uses of the information. Real-time information such as those pertaining to weather, traffic or lighting etc can be shared and fixed accordingly in no time. This information could be used to inform public administrators of similar problems immediately, rather than problems going unsolved for days, weeks or even months causing disruption to citizens.

(Source: Dublin Tech Summit)

A Sneak Peek To The Future Smart City

Source: Gartner

Likewise, there are multiple cities around the world who have adapted to the smart city to improve the standard of life. For instance, as per Business Insider information, €365 million is assigned for the expansion of smart cities like Denmark, France and the United Kingdom by the European Commission.

As the Internet of Things is evolving, smart cities are no more a dream project now. The future of Internet of Things will be more enchanting, we are going to witness millions of things talking to each other and making cities smarter and bring a phenomenal difference to our life.  Mckinsey research predicted that “by 2020, the smart city industry is projected to be a $400 billion market, with 600 cities worldwide. These cities are expected to generate 60% of the world’s GDP by 2025.”

Well yes, this is just the beginning of a technological transformation, there is much more to explore it. What Internet of Things can literally do for us? Until then users are going to keep extracting and enjoying from these smart amenities, on the other hand, developers are going to keep innovating and experimenting the ability of Internet of Things.