Smart 2.0 – Healthy Buildings, Responsive Cities
Published on : Friday 15-05-2020
The current pandemic will surely change how developers, landlords, facilities firms, employees, and consumers view technology integration into buildings, asserts Amrita Chowdhury.
Smart Buildings and Smart Cities have been much talked about over the past several years. Viewed through the lens of public or enterprise spending or return on investment, both have seen as many proponents and champions as detractors and naysayers. However, the current public health crisis is creating the levers for changing the lens and impact through which enterprises and governments will consider these going forward.
Cities – Smart to Responsive
Smart Cities have focused on implementing interconnected systems and software, and data analytics for interconnected city systems for various city functions such as surveillance, traffic management, utilities management, transport, air quality, waste management, and more. Smart Cities have quickly reoriented themselves to respond to the current crisis. Several cities have converted their smart city command and control centres in war rooms for managing the corona crisis. Surveillance systems and video analytics systems, along with GIS, and analytics software suites, have been redeployed to monitor social distancing and clustering. Emergency systems are being used to share messaging with citizens. Special tools and applications have been quickly developed to ease citizen facing emergency relief measures, and for documenting and enabling health response and containment measures.
Agra Smart City has been a pioneer in showcasing best practices in corona management, where the entire city administration and smart city teams have come together to collaboratively and proactively deliver responsive initiatives for citizens. Even in emergency situation, the city has been able to rally teams and external experts, and use data and tech driven measures. On the corona management side, Agra has used scientific and data-led methods for contact tracing, cluster containment, and used public private partnerships to create a large number of isolation and quarantine centres and health management initiatives. On the citizen relief measures, supply chains have been stitched up for door step delivery of essentials with tech enabled citizen platform, e-doctor services, and citizen self-registry platform for risk assessment coupled with location based response mapping. The surveillance and PA systems, control and command room, and digital public health centres, built under the Smart City Mission, have been repurposed.
The public health measures, even post lockdown, are expected to linger for longer. The lessons learned during this tough time will help cities become more citizen centric and responsive. This experience in rapid integration and action can form the basis for cities to continue to leverage multi-functional teams and interconnected technologies, along with agile digital solutions, to deliver deeper impact for citizens.
Buildings – Smart to Healthy
Smart Buildings have been much debated in the past few years. Early adopters have focused on sustainability and cost to implement building systems, IoT technologies, and data analytics that provide efficiency, ease, optimisation, and preventive maintenance. Equally, others in the business of constructing, leasing, managing, maintaining, or cleaning buildings have been searching for clear return on investments to create and replicate business models and solutions. The current pandemic will surely change how developers, landlords, facilities firms, employees, and consumers view technology integration into buildings. Once lockdown ends and businesses reopen, people will still be distrustful of public spaces and work spaces. Technology enablement will focus more on creating and maintaining healthy spaces, healthy workforce, and in turn, healthy cities.
Buildings, commercial and public spaces will need to deploy technologies for measuring, monitoring, preventing, and improving air quality, air flow and ventilation systems, waste segregation and management, water and waste water management, and lighting that creates healthy spaces. Special entry exit protocols will come into play, along thermal screening and various camera and video based technologies to track clustering, queuing, and more. People would look into contactless delivery, shift management, spacing and occupancy limits, zoning, and other measures for managing the inflow and outflow of people into offices, malls, and transport hubs. The maintenance and facilities of buildings will also come under focus to ensure healthy staff and healthy practices. Technology will be used to deliver to higher level of service levels and health and hygiene standards. Various camera, sensor, and digital technologies will be used to monitor hygiene levels, workforce, and processes. Central data-driven systems and analytics will be used to manage quality and cost of operations.
Even a month ago, many of these technologies, while lauded, were being considered for a future time when return on investment was established. The future has arrived now, and building owners and their maintenance and facilities providers will need to quick revamp and retool to meet the new expectations and risks. The cost of not acting will be higher in terms of health risks at a societal and commercial level. Combining low-cost sensors, analytics, and cloud based applications, both retrofit or agile new solutions can be leveraged to create healthy buildings and public spaces.
Agile Tech
Both Smart Cities and Smart Buildings are served by a set of incumbent infra-tech companies. The ‘new normal’ will see – and is already seeing – the emergence of a set of new, agile, digital- born companies that are able to connect with existing systems and technology infrastructure to create cost-conscious but value-added solutions that can stitch up multiple stakeholders and processes to deliver health, hygiene, sanitation quality, and emergency response outcomes.
Gaia’s AI-IoT enterprise SaaS solutions enable monitoring and management of work sites, workforce, and workflows. Real estate and facilities firms have been deploying this for end-to- end operations to manage sanitation, hygiene, productivity, inventory, and experience. Over the past month, Gaia has been working with Agra Smart City to repurpose existing software platform and create agile tools for health risk and response management, as well as for citizen services for supplies, emergency monitoring, and relief management through digitally enabled city teams. Government bodies and industry associations are looking for firms that can create new tech solutions to meet the corona crisis, and the changed work place and public space and healthcare delivery outcomes, once the scare subsides. Collectively, governments, developers and landlords will need to partner with tech firms to create healthy spaces for citizens to work, live, play, and interact.
Amrita Chowdhury is co-founder and Director of Gaia, a technology firm providing AI-IoT enterprise SaaS solutions for smart sites, smart workforce, and smart workflow management. It serves clients in the Connected Sites and Smart Cities segments.