City of Things

There’s a huge number of potential applications of the internet of things in an environment as varied as a city. But to give ourselves some concrete examples on which we can base our research, we have focused on three main use cases:

1) Car parking addresses the possibilities created by instrumenting parking places of various types. There has been some significant work in this area, notably in San Francisco, that we are examining as part of the analysis.

2) Civic infrastructure looks at the potential of creating a sensor environment within the public realm and the services that could be developed from that. This includes environmental monitoring and street furniture that can report on its own status.

3) Personal sensors in the city looks at the sensors we are in control of, such as mobile phones, fitness devices and personal health sensors, how they interact with a pervasive data environment and the services that can then be derived.

We are looking at each of these use cases from a variety of perspectives: in terms of business models, in terms of technical issues around collecting, managing and distributing data and from the perspective of control of the data produced, particularly when this has a bearing on privacy or preferences of individuals.

In subsequent blog posts we’ll be writing about each of these cases in more detail.