IoT technology is a key driver for building smart city infrastructure. The potentials for urban management problems requiring process control and allocation mechanisms has long been acknowledged. However, up to now the potentials of equipping urban objects with sensors, information processing capability, and actuators to enable adaptation to pedestrians' individual needs have not yet been exploited. The objective of our research is to design smart urban objects that enhance usability and safety of the urban space for pedestrians. We report on our conceptual design for an IoT platform that connects the novel smart urban object adaptive park bench with an adaptive light system to actively support pedestrians in the urban environment, in particular senior citizens with handicaps.
IoT increasingly permeates the public area, e.g., in traffic control and public transport. We propose to equip conventional urban objects with IoT technology to transform them into Smart Urban Objects (SUO's). While there exists some research exploring the potentials, specific solutions to enhance safety for the elderly outdoors are still lacking. The elderly's safety is threatened due to declining physical conditions. As a consequence, the elderly may be excluded from outdoor activities such as participating in major events. Against this backdrop, we design SUOs for adaptive indications of urban hazards, barrierfree passages and for smart reservation of seats to enhance resting possibilities. We report on our solution using Bluetooth technology for remote sensing of older pedestrians serving as input for the objects' adaptive capacities. The SUOs have been installed for test purposes on a major event in a larger German city.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.