During my college years I worked night shifts at a company that installed and provided ‘Lojack’ services for cars and other vehicles. The year was 2001, pre WEB 2.0, touch screens and most definitely the pre-IoT; those days, we only had ‘IT’. It was then when I got my first taste of the strong tie between hardware and software in the most profound way possible — real-time & hands-on!
Tuesday 2:23am; i’m sitting in an overly bright fluorescent-lit situation room, working on my essay for tomorrow’s Art History class when all of a sudden my screen starts beeping. One red line in a long table of greens and yellows indicates the combo of ‘motion’ + ‘door open’ + hood open’ sensors in a locked car which can only mean one thing — this car is about to be stolen. The night shift spring into action; we upload the car’s location on to a larger screen, call the owner, and one of us opens a live line with the local police stations. While all this is happening we send several signals to the car, trying to re-arm the safety system but the car is on the move and the cellular technology signal has a hard time triangulating.
As the chase continues on the freeway we receive a stronger signal, strong enough to send an engine shut-down command to the car. The car slowly comes to a halt, police catches up, perpetrators are put under arrest…and i’m back working on my Art History essay.
I find it remarkable that in a time when ‘Nokia 3310’ was a cool mobile device we were already practicing IoT at such advanced levels; no touch interfaces around, sluggish internet and poor non-GPS location technology, but it worked!
Many years later I was asked to give a lecture on ‘Smart City’. I address any lecture I give as a startup pitch (minus the elevator part) — I research the topic, focus on the story, work a design mock-up or two into the slides and close with the promise of a brighter future!
My journey started in Google search “smart city” and quickly went wider and deeper into the many websites, videos, facts and figures that are associated with the original search term. Once I “graduated” from that first step I focused my research on transportation, sensor technology, IoT and way-finding.
You may have the best idea for anything but — neglect the story part and you lost your audience before you even started! Following the lead of Jessica Stillman, Andrew Stanton, J.J.Abrams and other good storytellers, I visually told the following story -
I always start with a little HX (human experience) practice called “introduce yourself before you start babbling” and make sure you establish trust and approach-ability with your audience; and so, I opened my lecture with a personal story of a car-jacking which dated back to the year 2001.
Now comes that “enemy slide”; it is quite surprising to learn how expensive is ‘lateness’ in our robust US economy. Truly impressive to learn about the financial implications of just being late.
Now that I scared my audience to full and undivided attention, right before we talk ‘imagine’ and ‘future’, I gave a quick review of the current technology trends associated with ‘smart city’ and ‘IoT’.
The vast diversity of IoT trends and supporting technologies that affect our lives as consumers, companies, cities and beyond is quite amazing. It’s always fun to draw the dotted line between solutions such as SmartHalo and city sensors that can monitor parking availability and even traffic.
Now comes the crescendo (drum roll…) — THE VISION!
We are surrounded with this breadth of wonderful technology but are we really utilizing it to its utmost potential? I believe that we’re still scraping the surface.
Several of the most common trends in smart cities today relay on sensor technology; sensors that detect motion, position and light, transmits loads of data to provide invaluable input about human and vehicular traffic and other properties in an urban environment. Some can also be used to control street lighting the same way we use in supermarkets aisles, saving money by switching the lights on/off based on people’s presence.
The ‘R&D Solution Seeker’ part in me will always dream, study and prototype what can we utilize out of what we have to serve as the next leap in our tech evolution; what do we need as users, as humans to make our cities, world and lives — better.
Way-finding and traffic navigation is still craving for perfection and further accuracy. Google maps (and its acquired Waze app) seem to do a decent job in these areas and still, the time-of-arrival feels more like wishful thinking than accurate science.
Stacy has a morning meeting the the office. She is still in her house, the meeting starts at 8:00am and Stacy wants to be there at exactly 7:52am which gives her enough time to grab coffee on her way to the conference room. Imagine Stacy’s calendar mobile app connected to a navigation app which draws on the power of the entire city sensory system. That system knows exactly at what point Stacy needs to blend into traffic outside her home so she can park the car at her office at precisely 7:52am. After-all, with no incidents and just normal traffic, how hard should it be for sensors across the city to sync the size of cars, speed and traffic control with the time to move from point A to point B, right? . . . right!
Big data is crucial when it comes to handling this smarter world of ours; as a visual jockey i’m naturally drawn to the graphical translation of data and here’s a breathtaking example of it. This is a day of public traffic, in and out of London, UK. Take a moment to look at this video and while you do, think about all the data collected which was used to produce this sequence and what you would use this data for.
Now that I got your juices flowing here comes the next ‘beyond’ — Sound! Much like ‘light’ and ‘motion’, sound is also pretty easy to detect and read but it is very different as it’s wave form introduces both higher complexity and wider array of properties. What if, among those other sensors throughout the city and beyond, we would incorporate an advance network of sound receptors? How would we utilize those in new and innovative ways? here are 2 examples -
1
Say you’re the city’s Chief Engineer; we can imagine your day is pretty packed with supervision and service to all the city systems which are under your control and responsibility; you monitor, manage and fix everything with the help of your many crews of dedicated women and men.
The data flow of service calls, tracking maintenance and foreseeing the unforeseeable is mind-blowing and the time that passes between something happening to it being reported and to your crews fixing it could translate to hundreds, thousands and in some cased millions of good city dollars; so, what if….?
What if your city is rigged with a grid of sound receptors sensor-array that can monitor the ‘normal’ sound levels of every area in your city and alert you of any spike which is out of the norm. What if you receive an alert on your city monitoring app telling you that in the last 15 minuets there is an increased noise level (7% above normal) that keeps trending up in a specific intersection? What if you can send a nearby crew to that location just to have a look-see? What if it’s a 5000k fix on it’s way to becoming a 5M fix in the next hour?
2
As I led into this article with way-finding, here’s my second example — say a child is being kidnapped!
Time is a key factor here; any minute that passes will determine if this child’s family will ever seem her or him again. After several minutes of information collected from eye witnesses, the police will issue an ‘Amber Alert’; by that time the vehicle and the people in it are at large with the chances of pin pointing their location getting slimmer.
But what if…? What if the sound sensors across the city and into the highway are using modern sensor technology that could isolate the pulsating sound waves of any specific car engine, compare it live and track it between monitoring sensors to draw a line on the map? What if that information is consumed on a digital panel in every police car in the city? What if those “digital ears” coordinate their data with the “digital eyes” (traffic cameras) across the city leading to an accurate rout of pursuit and an accurate ID of the vehicle?
Imagine a world where everyone and everything is connected, with IoT technologies spanning across trillions of devices and machines with zeta-bytes of real-time data processing in seconds. We are at the very beginning of an experience that connects and engages people, devices and data simultaneously at unparalleled speed, capacity and affordability.
As we unlock these barriers, our limitations decrease and our possibilities are truly endless.
Thank you for imagining!
