Wearable sensors and building management systems will talk to each other in real time, turning a city into a responsive network that can adjust heating, reroute traffic, or coordinate evacuations during a disaster. This research tackles a fundamental gap: today’s smart city technologies typically operate in silos. A wearable fitness tracker does not speak to a building’s ventilation system, and a traffic sensor does not know how many people are inside a shopping centre. The University of Southampton team aims to build the hardware and software infrastructure that lets these systems share data securely and reliably, with people—not just infrastructure—at the centre. If successful, the work could enable ultra-personalised services—for example, a building that adjusts its air conditioning based on the number of occupants and their activity levels, or a city that sends real-time pollution alerts to individuals based on their location and health status. The same platform could support crowdsensing initiatives for traffic and air quality monitoring, and help emergency services coordinate evacuations during major incidents. The project is fundamentally about creating the underlying architecture for a people-centred smart city, rather than delivering a specific application.
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The focus of this Platform Grant is the combination of wearable systems networked with smart city and building management systems, and the processing of the collected data. The Platform will cover infrastructure and devices and will require innovation in hardware and software in order to realise the goal of a people centred smart city. The topic of the Platform and the underpinning research themes require a multidisciplinary approach that can be provided by the unique expertise of the research group in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Applications of the technologies will enable effective collection, communication, and processing of this data that, in turn, will enable applications such as crowdsensing activities or allow, for example, the provisioning of ultra-personalised services for users to enrich their experience as they navigate their environment, and engage in work and leisure. Such a capability would allow them to purchase personalised services (e.g. healthcare, entertainment, fashion), enable participatory sensing initiatives to support smart city applications (e.g. real-time traffic updates, pollution monitoring), or help coordinate evacuations during major disasters. Combining wearable sensors with intelligent building management systems can provide distributed sensing of the environment within the building as well as monitoring user activity and wellbeing in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of building services (e.g. heating, and ventilation). Such a capability will also become an important research tool to aid in our understanding of building occupant behaviour. Key research challenges exist in developing user-friendly ubiquitous energy-constrained wearable systems and interfacing these reliably and securely with external networks. Wearable sensors and devices will place individuals at the centre of the smart city and enable a step change in the level of interaction possible. It is essential to develop robust, agile algorithms and mechanisms that can cope with potential failures that may arise in the sensors and networks. Combining AI with sensors enables intelligent interacting agents that can form multi-agent systems exceptionally capable of solving problems and interpreting information. Such developments will underpin autonomous systems, benefit the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) and enable the next generation of smart city applications. A flexible funding Platform underpinning the group in these crucial areas of expertise will enable pioneering work and the pursuit of emerging opportunities.
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