Internet of Things (IoT) no longer represents the connected gadgets making our homes smarter. Still, IoT is now into a bigger arena to transform urban life, whether in the workplace, homes, public transport, or industries. The power of the connected ecosystem is now visible across all spheres of life, including the city waste management, traffic control, street lights, and security systems to protect citizens.
As per the latest UN prediction by the year 2050, the global population in cities is going to be around 6.7 million, which is just the double of today’s population. To deal with this massive population growth and corresponding demands IoT device ecosystem is considered to play a significant role. IoT app developers and connected device manufacturers continue to surprise us with new and innovative solutions for city dwellers. Here we will explain some of the notable use cases of IoT to enhance the quality of life in cities today.
Maintaining Traffic
The connected traffic system is already in use across many cities around the world, and it is playing a significant role in easing out the congestion of traffic and making traffic conditions better. The integrated IoT based traffic infrastructure can lead to lesser accidents, better driving conditions, faster roads, and seamless hassle-free tolling systems. The integrated payment system, coupled up with the traffic system, can ease out the payment process for toll tax counters and help saving time for the passengers and drivers.
Connected infrastructure can play a significant role in optimizing traffic flow. Already the experiments with such connected traffic systems are going on across some major US cities. In Las Vegas, robust sensors equipped with Machine Learning systems have been deployed in significant road crossings in one part of the city. These sensors, by taking real-time count of vehicles and pedestrians are providing useful insights about traffic congestion. Such insights and analytics in the future can help to ease out traffic flow across crowded metropolitans all over the globe.
Doing Away with Air Pollution
Air pollution has emerged as a major deterrent to quality lifestyle in many parts of the globe in recent years. A vast majority of the cities in developing nations are suffering from poor air quality and rising levels of dust and smoke pollution. When all preventive measures are failing flat to curb air pollution, connected technologies are giving new hope to improve air quality.
Smart sensors equipped with robust Machine Learning systems can evaluate the air quality round the clock and share the data on various parameters with the scientists and administrators. By knowing the different environmental factors and critical constituents leading to bad air quality, environmental scientists and city planners can hatch out specific plans to curb pollution in different seasons.
Smart Parking Systems
In the world’s major cities, parking vehicles remains to be a nightmarish problem for ages. The overgrowth of the city population and corresponding growth in the number of cars and human settlements seem to compete for space with more rigor than ever before.
Naturally, smarter utilization of vacant parking spots and parking lots can be a great answer to enhance availability for the waiting vehicles. Smart connected systems across city parking lots can make drivers informed about the availability of nearest parking spots in real-time and thus save them from parking problems and hassles on the road.
Reducing Food Waste
It is alarming information that more than one-third of consumable food around the world is just wasted in one way or the other. No doubt, this waster food can serve millions of hungry people if they are prevented from being wasted in due time. Preventing food waste is also challenging simply because most food items have a minimal shelf life, and it needs immediate preservation to preserve their food value.
Fortunately, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology with the connected device ecosystem can play a significant role in curbing this food wastage. Through a combination of sensors, high-quality outdoor camera systems, AI-based systems, and weather systems, a new startup called Prospera helped farmers to respond to agricultural problems leading to corp wastage. Their solution helped farmers knowing exactly where and how they need to irrigate more. Similar connected systems can also be implemented across hotel and restaurant chains to track food consumption and mediate for supplying the unconsumed food to the poor people.
Smart Street Lighting
Street lights in smart cities are also getting smarter thanks to IoT-based connected lighting technologies. Streetlights fully equipped with smart sensors can help cost-effective and timely maintenance with the least human intervention. This will help reduce the budget spent on city lights besides providing lights in all parts of the city in a timely and effortless manner.
Smart lighting solutions besides helping with maintenance and low-cost advantages can also work in coordination with smart security systems and cameras to gather data about traffic and people’s movement. This will come handy in terms of planning and improving security for the cities.
Conclusion
There are loads of smart use cases of the Internet of Things (IoT) that can improve the quality of human life. We just picked here a selected few to explain the role of smart connected gadget and sensor ecosystem in enhancing the quality of human life across cities.
Author Bio
Paul Osborne is Chief Technology Officer at Cerdonis Technology LLC- A mobile app development company helping business and enterprise to get solution of their day to day business problems by developing live streaming mobile app. He enjoys writing about app development & IoT, AI & ML and creating valuable information for other developers.
