Smart Communities Need An Integrated IoT Strategy

Smart Communities Need An Integrated IoT Strategy Originally posted on Forbes.com

As cities try to manage rising costs against budgets that won't keep up, many of them are showing a keen interest in smart community initiatives. Smart community projects aim to improve cities' operational efficiency and public safety as well as citizens' lives by gathering, analyzing and acting upon data collected from sensors connected via the Internet of Things (IoT). We call this fusion of the IoT with AI-based analysis, AIoT. Smart community applications can help cities reduce noise, improve pedestrian and traffic safety, monitor air or water quality, manage congestion, reduce crime and streamline billing for city services, among other things. Allied Market Research predicts that worldwide smart city spending will grow from over $648 billion in 2020 to over $6.06 trillion in 2030.

When communities experiment with their first AIoT solutions, their appetite for more of them usually only grows. As a result, the fundamental challenge is to build with one eye on the future and the other on today's needs. For example, many cities have deployed automated license plate reader (ALPR) applications for police and sheriff's departments, and there are numerous vendors that offer ALPR systems or ALPR system hardware or software. However, when the city wants to add a traffic flow management system or an acoustic monitoring system, it has to go back to the drawing board and start over. Each application comes with its own storage requirements, analytical capabilities and management system, so the expansion of smart community applications means higher and higher costs for monitoring and resources.

Heavy Lifting: Deploying A Smart Community Application

Even for the simplest applications, the deployment process involves several steps:

• Planning (goals, tactics, resource identification, site selection).

• Hardware (sensors, edge computing servers, data center storage and servers).

• Software (data collection, aggregation and storage; data analysis and decision-making via AI or machine learning).

• Connectivity (protocol selection, SIM cards and connectivity contract).

• Deployment, configuration, integration and testing.

• Rollout (communication with stakeholders and users).

In a community deploying one smart application at a time, these steps must be repeated with each application, multiplying costs and complexity. Further, unless planned for in advance, integrating data between applications—a timely, expensive and sometimes impossible challenge—and point solutions often require multiple management systems. These solutions also cost more because they require buying multiple products individually rather than getting an integrated solution that's designed to have multiple solutions working together. Finally, the risk of cybersecurity breaches is greater because there are more systems to monitor.

For example, one of our healthcare customers bought a dozen refrigerators for storing blood, chemotherapy drugs, Covid-19 vaccines, flu vaccines and other medications. They wanted to remotely monitor these refrigerators, but they ended up with more than a dozen different interfaces they needed to pay for and access.

To avoid scenarios like this, one step community planners should consider taking is looking for AIoT platforms that can combine sensors, data collection software, data management software, AI analysis and decision-making, and connectivity. With this approach, the platform can become a foundation for IoT's current and future application deployment and integration, and it can deliver far more functionality in terms of cross-application analysis. For example, our hospital customer ultimately switched to an integrated solution via an AIoT platform, which enables monitoring, management and reporting of all refrigeration units. This saves a lot of manpower and enables comprehensive analysis and unified reporting.

Most communities have little to no experience with AIoT applications and technology, so the most important parts of the process outlined earlier are education and planning. Assign one or more people on your staff to learn the basics of AIoT technology and applications—perhaps a new smart community facilities management group. At the same time, find out what your overall goals might be by surveying department heads about the challenges they face over the next five years. For example, near-term and midterm goals might include improving pedestrian safety, smoothing traffic flows, reducing crime or lowering the cost of water quality monitoring. Then, prioritize those goals before consulting with an appropriate AIoT solutions provider.

We are only at the beginning of smart community technology. Nobody can predict how it will evolve over the next couple of decades, but it's safe to say that dozens of new applications will appear. To facilitate the planning process, city builders should lay out a road map of anticipated smart community applications before researching platforms that can integrate them all. It's better to build on a foundation that supports seamless growth than it is to assemble a collection of siloed applications.