7 Reasons to Fall in Love with Smart Cities

Each city has its own unique design and atmosphere that make us connect with its streets and boulevards on some deeper, emotional level. We love seeing our home cities develop and grow as if it’s our close family member, and we enjoy visiting new destinations that allow us to dive into unexplored urban jungles and open our minds to different lifestyles. What we see now is that smart cities - through their digital entourage of electronic devices and IoT solutions - are making our lives even more comfortable, safe, and productive than ever before.

The best thing about IoT solutions for smart cities is how they make it feel like the city cares about us as much as we care about the city. That kind of city you just can’t help but fall in love with.

Transportation and parking

A vast number of modern cities have already adopted an IoT-powered public transport management solution, which allows you to easily access real-time GPS and other transportation data from your smartphone. There are also cameras, smart traffic lights, and digital traffic signs that enable dispatchers - or AI algorithms - to balance out car traffic based on up-to-date information about incidents and road congestion. Finding a spot at the parking lot gets easier too when you get a prompt from an autonomous network of parking sensors. And how about the new form of wireless payments when your car pays for fuel without you even touching a card or phone? Yep, that’s a reality already.

Smart lighting

Big city lights are pure beauty for our eyes but also create a comfortable feeling of safety when we stroll back home late at night. Smart lighting solutions make use of ambient light sensors, proximity sensors, cameras, and smart LED bulbs to adjust lighting intensity according to available daylight and street occupancy. Not only does this smart approach allow for superb cost savings, but also engenders a feeling of a city as a living and breathing being, which shines bright late in the evening and then gradually falls asleep leaving only a warm glow on its streets, parks, and boulevards.

Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the leading industries that successfully adopted IoT innovations and raised the bar for quality of urban living. Building on the capabilities of IoT-powered devices to collect nuanced health data, healthcare providers offer increasingly more personalized medical services and use smart medical wearables for real-time patient health monitoring even beyond the hospital premises.

Public safety

Creating a safe environment without intruding much on personal privacy is one of the key objectives of IoT solutions for smart cities. For this reason, public surveillance systems equipped with smart cameras and image recognition technologies seem to offer great results. Multiple studies provided evidence of crime rates dropping after implementing such cameras at scale. Smart lighting solutions also significantly aid in crime prevention, including crime against property. And even if smart cameras might look like a generous investment in the cases where better lighting can do the job, they are absolutely indispensable for improving road safety.

Online citizen

As our cities become more digital and innovative, so should we. Using your smartphone to connect with every aspect of urban development is practically effortless these days and allows you to access whatever services you may need. Online citizen initiatives also enable us to participate in making our cities a better place. There are smart city applications that allow you to report issues by attaching photos, create petitions for public initiatives, and vote for the city projects that you think deserve the priority funding.

Smart energy

We don’t think of it much, but efficient energy consumption is a crucial metric for our cities. That’s why a great deal of IoT transformation goes behind the scenes by implementing smart meters and smart grid infrastructure for optimized cost of energy supply. But smart energy is also about avoiding unnecessary waste of electricity at our homes and workplaces. Adopting solutions for more economical energy consumption wherever we can supports us in developing more eco-friendly lifestyles.

Sustainable urban development

Sustainable urban design & development is a key priority for every modern city. To that end, IoT technology is clearly of great help. Every part of our life can be further improved by adding some smart calculation and efficiency offered by IoT-powered solutions. And yet we should also remember that smart cities are still in their infancy. Integrating diverse IoT smart city solutions - as well as autonomous vehicles, 5G, smart factories, and numerous other next-gen technologies - into a cohesive digital whole is a promising roadmap for the new decade.

If you want to learn more about the role and capabilities of an IoT platform for smart city implementations, please refer to our use cases in the Solutions section, access the free Kaa IoT Cloud trial, or contact us.