There will soon come a day when your toilet is able to provide medical advice.
The humble lavatory will be just one of the estimated 50 billion connected devices that will fill our homes, lives and cities in 2020 as more gadgets and home appliances become “smart” and connected.
With the amount of data these devices will churn out, they will play a big role in the creation of the smart city to help drive efficiency and sustainability.
“The three key assets of smart cities are sustainability, economic and environmental,” says Wim Elfrink, the executive vice president of industry solutions and chief globalisation officer at Cisco.
“Future competition will be between cities, not just to attract business, but also people.”
The concept of the smart city has started to take hold in the Middle East, particularly in this country. Dubai’s Smart City initiative for the Expo 2020 will illustrate a sophisticated and sustainable way of life in the emirate where everyday items will contain sensors and internet connectivity to provide feedback and information.
By 2030, about 60 per cent of the world’s population will be living in cities, according to the World Health Organisation. In these dense urban areas, there will be a need to create services that reduce clutter, complexity and pollution.
Something as menial as a toilet bowl able to monitor what is deposited could, if it senses something is wrong, relay the information back to the user’s doctor. That would mean medics could remotely diagnose the problem thus reducing the need for a visit, which would in turn help to free up traffic, cut fuel consumption and reduce medical costs.
In this type of world, everything is connected, not just for the sake of it, but for creating more sustainable lives and cities. The intention is to provide easy access to education, health care, entrepreneurship and innovation while driving up the efficiency of the city as a whole.
“It is well documented that cities occupy just 2 per cent of land mass but house half the world’s population, consuming 75 per cent of energy output and discharging approximately 80 per cent of carbon emissions,” says Benoit Dubarie, the country president for the UAE, Oman and Pakistan at Schneider Electric.
“Add to the mix the rate of urbanisation and it is clear that we have a significant challenge on our hands.”
Smart cities try to address these issues by installing smart parking, water, public services such as lighting and waste management in an integrated manner to help to conserve energy and reduce wastage.
“The killer app will be smart-parking. You can reduce congestion by 30 per cent. The average citizen spends four years looking for parking space,” says Mr Elfrink.
By monitoring the general patterns of drivers, smart-parking applications could predict when a spot will be free, enabling drivers to find a space within the quickest time possible, helping to reduce traffic and carbon emissions.
Through the use of video surveillance and smart lighting, street lamps can dimmed or brightened depending on the number of people in the area, helping to conserve energy.
“This will be the world, not just in Dubai, but there will be an acceleration here,” says Alfonso di Ianni, the senior vice-president for East Central Europe, Middle East and Africa at Oracle.
“Sustainability of investment is central to the government now, that will be an important point. Every day will have a much more green context.”.
While the main aim of smart cities is to drive up efficiency, it is also to make lives more convenient for residents. As wearable technologies become more readily available, the data drawn from these can provide tailored solutions and services.
“There is a huge opportunity. Big data tells you what you don’t know so that it can help you predict the right choices,” says Mr di Ianni.
“Everybody will be wired, any visitor will have access to what is going on, the best recommendation for restaurants, hotel, schedule of events, financial services, credit card usage, everything will be mobile, much more than today.”
But with each device that becomes connected, hackers will have yet another platform from which to attack or host their cyber criminal activities. Most recently a botnet was discovered on connected fridges with criminal gangs making use of the fridges’ internet connectivity to launch malicious emails, making it virtually impossible to identify the attackers.
“A smart city is not only when people are connected together, but people are getting connected to ideas, to machines, to things,” says Eric Claudel the senior vice president for the Middle East and Africa at Gemalto.
“Cities are trying to fulfil their human potentials and improving the quality of life in a convenient manner. This needs to be done in a safe manner and with security in mind.”
The use of Emirates ID cards has enabled better security nationally, according to Mr Claudel, who argues more services should require the use of the ID card to increase security further.
“We give our mobile number everywhere, but this is not very secure, someone can misuse your identity by misusing your phone number,” he says.
As governments make strenuous efforts to become more efficient and sustainable via an increasingly smart world, a fertile environment for illicit cyber activity is also developing.
Better authentication methods such as the use of biometric data can help to increase security but there is no way of completely ensuring the safety of a connected city.
Attackers will always find a way in if there is a connection.
thamid@thenational.ae
