IoT Transforms Cities
and Improves Quality of Life
Municiple management has become an increasingly challenging task in the 21st Century. Planners need more sophisticated and rigorous disaster preparedness, environmental sustainability, and climate adaptation systems to protect citizens and minimize economic risk. They need precise, detailed and thorough environmental information to provide informed guidance for their communities.
When it comes to heat mapping of an urban environment, planners’ and analysts’ ability to perform accurate analysis is often limited by their dependence on Landsat data. Despite significant advancements in satellite technology, high-altitude imagery still lacks the crucial street-level information that is essential for understanding microenvironments within urban settings. Furthermore, the resolution provided by Landsat is not adequate for conducting such meticulous analysis in densely populated areas.
IoT can help address these challenges effectively. A variety of specialized and accurate sensors collect on-the-ground environmental data such as solar radiation, wind speed, temperature, humidity and rainfall. These sensors can be strategically located throughout the city at different elevations and positions by installing them on buildings, lampposts and other infrastructure. This system produces a more layered and comprehensive view of the city’s environmental conditions. Data-generated heat maps provide precise visual depictions of the cityscape, highlighting elements such as building shadows and street-level wind tunnels. The heat maps can reveal areas that are prone to extreme or unusual conditions and offer other valuable insights that can’t be seen from satellite images.
Prediction and Response
Predictive systems save lives and reduce damage to communities by enabling timely evacuation and efficient resource allocations. Continuous data gathering and immediate alerts from state-of-the-art weather and seismic monitoring systems leads to better decisions and more timely responses.
The quality of predictions improves over time as machine learning algorithms analyze and continue to learn, but this requires many data points over a long perdiod of time - something satellite data does provide continuously. These predictions enhance the community’s ability to plan and respond effectively to increasingly common hazards such as flood, drought and other forms of extreme weather. Better data about the community also supports better planning for green spaces, renewable energy installations, and efficient transportation routes. And, it is also the foundation for improving decisions in environmental impact assessments of construction projects and ensuring compliance with conservation and climate adaptation goals.
Implementation Hurdles
With all the benefits that can come from implementing IoT into urban planning systems, why has it not spread faster in cities around the world? Integration hurdles have delayed the widespread IoT adoption in many applications where this solution is desperately needed. Currently, an IoT implementation requires coordination between at least four different providers: device manufacturers, cloud software providers connectivity providers and certfication bodies.
Coordinating so many systems and providers adds complexity, cost, and risk to the project. It’s not surprising that municipalities and service providers frequently experience suboptimal outcomes from IoT projects due to a lack of accountability and transparency, compromised security, extended development times and uncontrolled costs during project implementation.
Bridging the Gap
The Rodeo IoT is a comprehensive suite of tools which create a single point of contact between the ‘physical’ data and the analysis and predictive decision-making tools. It standardizes the common elements within one stable and secure platform which results in consistent, reliable, real-time data on demand, which can be used to empower better prediction and analysis for municipalities. This standardization provides significant advantages to IoT developers and implementers too. It dramatically reduces the development time by up to one year and the associated cost by 75%. Rodeo keeps data safe and private with industry standard security practices, and data transparency is assured - Rodeo IoT does not analyze, own, or sell any client data. Organizations are able to remotely monitor devices and applications in real-time so that they can quickly identify and respond to hardware and software faults. This eliminates countless hours of valuable downtime that might otherwise be consumed in manually checking devices in the field.
Data-driven decisions improve urban quality of life. Comprehensive environmental data and precise disaster prediction are already helping cities provide a higher quality of life for the citizens. The results are dramatic and improving every day. Here are some benefits that citizens can expect from city planning and disaster management in the future:
faster and more effective disaster response, saving lives and minimizing damage
improved environmental conservation
improved climate adaptation while accommodating population growth
greater accountability from municipal services and subcontractors
better resource allocation for emergency response services
Let the Rodeo IoT data acquisition platform be your partner in bringing the benefits of data driven decision making to your community
