Kathy Gibson at the Ericsson Business Innovation Forum in Stockholm – The reality of smart cities is likely to be driven by connected citizens in a bottom-up movement.
Michael Bjorn, head researcher of Ericsson Consumer Lab, says that the Internet facilitates smart choices in city life.
“As the Internet makes us more informed, we make more informed decisions in city life,” he says. “As we become more connected, we have access to a large amount of information and use it to make decisions. The more information we have the better decisions we should make – and so we should become smarter as people because we have more information.”
The same holds true for how we live our city lives, he says, with smarter citizens driving smarter cities.
“This is an important bottom-up transformation,” Bjorn says.
Recent research from the Ericsson Consumer Lab examined how people in different cities use information in a productive way in their city life. Overall, the survey found that 76% of citizens think we should have traffic volume maps; 70% think about daily energy usage comparisons; and 66% want water quality checkers.
These findings differed widely between developed and developing cities, between different demographics within the cities, and even between cities and their own suburbs.
Not surprisingly, young people and students are the most proactive in driving the bottom-up transformation, closely followed by full-time workers.
“But the idea of the smart citizens doesn’t stop there,” Bjorn says. “There are three areas where citizens experience dissatisfaction with city life: transportation, communication with authorities and healthcare.”
With traffic being the top frustration, Ericsson tested the concepts of interactive road navigation, social bike/car sharing and indoor directions.
The second most frustrating aspect was communication with authorities, so respondents were asked their opinion on a track of the city, unified biometric IS and public service queue tag.
Three concepts were offered in terms of healthcare and care: heart rate monitoring ring, digital health network, posture sensor.
Not surprisingly, traffic generated the highest usefulness rating.
However, healthcare and care concepts came out tops in terms of predicted daily use. Although the lowest predicted daily user, at 25% for traffic apps, was still significant.
Citizens believe strongly that these concepts should be delivered by city authorities, and that the people responsible for services should extend these services to become more relevant and to have an IT component.
On the flip side, citizens don’t necessarily trust the authorities to have their best interests at heart (28% of respondents), with 66% wanting to retain control of the dissemination of their information.
The key findings from the survey are that when city dwellers use the Internet, we start making smarter more informed decisions which make the cities smarter in their own right,” Bjorn says.
“Smart citizens want to alleviate frustrations with care/healthcare; communication with authorities; and traffic. And citizen want current service providers to extend current services with an ICT component to make the services better.”