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Adelaide, the capital of the state of South Australia, and the country’ s fifth most populous city, is participating in the newly launched Australian Smart Cities Consortium, and already implementing solutions in the fields of transport, healthcare and liveability.
While Adelaide has low levels of traffic by Australian standards, it still suffers from frustrating traffic jams. As part of the planned smart city solutions, the tracking of traffic flow can optimize the movement of cars through busy areas, buses will be fitted with GPS tracking that will allow commuters to know their position, new bike lanes can be built that will integrate safely and more efficiently with existing traffic, and pedestrian crossings can be provided with timers that allow for safer road crossings. All of these technologies are quite old by smart city standards, but the novelty lies in the sensor data and planning information that allow the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure to pin down the city’ s problems and determine which solutions to use for solving them.
Healthcare is another field in which smart solutions can be implemented, especially to improve the quality of life of an aging population. Adelaide is currently implementing “smart ageing’, introducing non-intrusive monitoring to look after elderly and isolated citizens without violating their privacy. Non-intrusive monitoring can check whether someone has fallen or hasn’ t got out of bed, or monitoring a house’ s temperature in order to automatically notify a contact or care worker if it becomes too hot or too cold.
Finally, smart solutions can contribute to the more efficient maintenance of green spaces such as parks, public gardens and playgrounds. Non-camera-based sensors (again, to respect privacy) can keep track of how many people are using a park or whether a certain piece of play equipment in a playground is not being used because it is broken. This optimizes maintenance, as workers can be dispatched when something needs fixing instead of having to routinely check if everything is in working order.
The original article can be found here.