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How
smartphones are improving city life in Singapore
By Meera Senthilingam, for CNN
Updated 1928 GMT (0228 HKT) June 24, 2015
(CNN)Throughout cities around the world, digital
information is readily shared and collected through smartphones, tablets,
sensors and other communication devices that have become part of everyday life.
But in the streets of Singapore, this amounting of
"big data" will soon be used to improve urban life through LIVE
Singapore! -- a project that uses real-time data to track and affect
the activity of a city.
"We can analyze the pulse of the city, moment to
moment," says Carlo Ratti, Director of the MIT Senseable city lab,
which runs the project as part of the Singapore-MIT alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).
"Over the past decade, digital technologies have
begun to blanket our cities, forming the backbone of a large, intelligent
infrastructure," says Ratti, who believes cities have become open-air
computers storing information that should be harnessed and tapped into.
The team are exploring the use of data in Singapore
due to its unique existence as a city, nation and island.
"It becomes an ideal lab to study the link
between technology and city planning," says Ratti.
Traffic,
crowds and rainfall
By tapping in to real-time information about their
city, Singaporeans could make day-to-day decisions based on their environment --
creating a feedback loop between people, their actions and their city -- whilst
simultaneously contributing to the data they are collecting.
Such feedback can impact factors influencing daily
life, ranging from overcrowding and traffic jams to temperature control and
taxi availability. The more data available, the more impact it can have.
"The power increases exponentially," says
Ratti.
One example is the monitoring of mobile phone use
throughout the city-state to track the movements of people and provide
information about crowding.
According to the MIT Senseable city lab, mobile phone
penetration in Singapore is more than 140%, as people own more than one mobile
phone.
By using data from cell phone networks in Singapore,
maps can be created to visualize where usage is highest -- and therefore where
the number of people is highest.
The use of urban space can be revealed in real-time.
A more environmental example is the tracking of people
and vehicles during rainfall. Singapore's tropical climate means rainfall is
frequent and torrential.
"The local weather has a major impact on the
behaviour of a population," says Gerhart Schmitt, Professor of Information
Architecture and Founding Director of the
Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore. "[It is] at the same time
influenced by and influencing the population," he says.
Schmitt's center are developing a range of
visualization technologies to inform users about factors such as air quality --
when planning a route to walk -- or traffic jam prediction.
Tailored
Taxis
According to Schmitt, taxis make up almost 1/5 of the
car transportation load in Singapore and numbers are expected to be similar in
other high-density cities worldwide.
"It's important...to visualize the availability
of taxis," says Schmitt.
Singapore's
mobility is reliant on taxis. Data on taxi movements and rainfall patterns can
help people travel during a downpour.
For LIVE Singapore, Ratti's team have combined this
demand for taxis with the city's climate. Their sample visualization blends
taxi locations and rainfall data to enable the development of apps helping
locals hail taxis during a downpour.
The use of this form of data is somewhat limitless
with potential and has also been used to visualize temperature hotspots based
on the 'heat island' effect where buildings, cars and the use of cooling units
causes temperatures to rise, as well as broader scale information such as the
global reach of Singapore's ports and airports.
Schmitt's teams are exploring the uses of public
transport data generated from smart-card based ticketing systems now common
across the world and further researching the urban heat island effects in
Singapore, which they believe will eventually reduce liveability. "[It]
has become quite serious," he says
Is there
an app for that?
For now, Ratti is mainly showing the potential uses of
big data generated within a city like Singapore but his goal is to make the
data more readily available, and accessible, to create a platform on which
others access the data and create new apps tailored to the city's needs.
"The way it will change people's lives is through
different types of apps," says Ratti. "LIVE Singapore! can start
ideas for combining data, which can become apps," he says.
This is the goal of Ratti's follow-up data project -- data collider -- due to
launch publicly in 6 months as a broader platform to spark new ideas.
"Anybody can use it to visualize and explore the
data and learn more about their city," he says.
