Community Resilience
The Smart City and the John Lewis effect
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FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on how fire and rescue services can tap into the Internet of Things
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Understanding the Internet of Things So what is the Internet of Things? The simple answer is: things, data, people. Building on the idea of the smart home, take the smoke alarm. Plied with different types of sensors and with wi-fi connectivity, the smoke alarm can be controlled through a smart phone. Users can proactively look at the smart phone app, view the status of the smoke alarm from anywhere with Internet connectivity. The interaction between the smoke alarm on the ceiling in a home and a remote service via the Internet can mean that it is monitored, checked and tested with no recourse to humans. Getting past the behaviour problems with smoke alarm testing, the smart smoke alarm has a lot going for it. But it is not cheap. This is a product aimed at an affluent consumer. It also comes at a different kind of cost: data. The data collected by the provider of the service that supports the smart smoke alarm is extensive. It records false positives, it records testing cycles, availability, it even knows when the owner switches the lights off, as in some products there is a night light effect to indicate the room has gone dark. This data is all recorded by the provider of the service. It is proprietary data that could be incredibly useful to policy makers considering how people behave in their homes and how to target prevention activity.
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hen John Lewis pays to insert a new 16-page colour booklet into Saturday’s Guardian, the subject has clearly hit the middle class (left of centre) mainstream. The front page says ‘Smart Home: experience the house of the future, today. We’re here to help you create a more efficient and easy-to-control home with smart technology’. John Lewis was advertising the launch of its new area on the fifth floor of its flagship Oxford Street store in London, where it is showcasing new ‘smart’ technology. Followers interested in the Internet of Things were well aware of the launch but sensibly the marketing material makes no mention of this term, as most people do not know what it is. Smart is easier to sell. And there is the rub: is the Internet of Things a technology in search of a purpose? Many cynics scoff at the idea of the Internet of Things, with the Twitter feed @internetofshit being the main outlet and source of great amusement.
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between the smoke alarm on the ceiling in a home and a remote service via the Internet can mean that it is monitored, checked and tested with no recourse to humans”
Smart products are good at collecting data. If the thing in this example is the smoke alarm, the data is the detail of the owner’s living habits, and the owner no longer has to think about the smoke alarm. It is where it should be: doing its job, quietly, efficiently and without recourse to human interaction. Sounds good? Maybe. Browsing through the John Lewis catalogue, there are examples of smart thermostats, smart security cameras, smart lights, even a smart fridge. Much has been made of the idea of the latter, able to interact with online shopping services, working out what should go on the shopping list, what fits with the diary of the owner and how thinking can be completely bypassed by the interaction between all the smart parts of life. It is all a bit sci-fi and fraught with problems, most recently highlighted by a company called Revolv, that was bought by smart home product provider, Nest. Revolv services were shut down recently, with little or no notice and much to the alarm of its user base. It is a bit minority and very few people will have even heard of Revolv, but the point is that buying in to a technology solution can create a dependency and when the support service is shut down, the technology does not work anymore. There is a long and amusing response to the closure of Revolv by Arlo Gilbert. He wrote a post on popular blogging site Medium called ‘The time that Tony Fadell sold me a container of hummus’. Tony Fadell is the CEO of Nest. The Revolv product looks a bit like a tub of
Community Resilience
Smart City and how
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including the first responders, showing where water levels are high and flooding likely. This is helpful for residents who are alerted when the levels are high, but also for local emergency planners looking to resource rescue and clear up efforts. It is examples like the Flood Network that make the Internet of Things a bit more real – a tangible example of technology improving people’s lives, but only because of shared data. At an organisational level, fire and rescue services can benefit from the same kind of technology. Think about hydrant inspection. In Norfolk there are 20,000 that need annual inspection. Would it be helpful if each one of these hydrants had a sensor attached to the pressure gauge that would relay information to fire and rescue staff to know which ones need attention more than others? What is the infrastructure to support that kind of connectivity and would it work in a rural county like Norfolk? These are good questions for the Smart City: does the idea work beyond the populated and technologically equipped city and into the regions and in particular rural areas. The Smart City may just be the preserve of the metropolis for now, but if Oxford can work out a solution for water level sensing, then why not fire hydrants in areas of a county like Norfolk? It is the sensors that provide the data. Relaying it back to the service provider – whether that is a Silicon Valley corporate giant or a rural fire and rescue service – is only useful if the data is acted upon. There is a great example from New York City of data being available, but unless it is analysed and looked at with a view to improving the experience of the citizen, it is kind of pointless.
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Smart Cities Looking beyond the home and into the realm of the Smart City (note the proper noun to denote its acceptance as a term) and the Internet of Things starts to make a bit more sense. Speaking at a TEDx event in September 2012, Stephen Hilton, then Director of Futures (really) at Bristol City Council, asked: “Do we want to be a Smart City?” To which he answered his own question: “I suggest we have no choice”. Going on, he expanded on what a Smart City should be: “We should look at our strengths, around community, around grassroots engagement, our creativity and see that as the source of our Smart City”. Four years on, Bristol is Open, a joint venture between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol, launched. The website sets out its vision: ‘Using data sensors, smart city technologies will be able to respond in realtime to everyday events, including congestion, waste management, entertainment events, e-democracy, energy supply and more’. It is the combination of the aspirations of Stephen Hilton in 2012 and the technology that is available in 2016 that will drive change in Bristol through investment in digital infrastructure that includes a data mesh connecting all street lamps and masses of fibre buried deep in the ground. People, places and things form the basis of the Smart City here and Bristol is Open is a major research and development effort to work out what this all means to improve people’s lives. From a public safety perspective, the Smart City has a lot to offer. Where investment is made along the lines of the example of Bristol, there is the potential for those involved in public safety to improve outcomes for people. Take flooding: would a network of sensors on river beds, connected to networks in cities (or any area for that matter) provide early warning of rising water levels to local residents to ensure that they left their homes before they are trapped and need rescuing by the emergency services? The Flood Network focused for now on Oxford is doing just this. Encouraging residents to install a flood monitor to collect data on water levels in nearby streams, the sensors can then relay the data via the Internet. The data is then presented on maps available to all,
“Consider the Fire
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hummus, in shape and size but not content. It is worth a read as a note of caution about having too much faith in the Internet of Things. This all might seem a bit gloomy, but there is light. The smart home is an example of the Internet of Things in action: a bunch of products that are found commonly in the home, packed with sensors, attached to the Internet and often talking to each other. Some work well, others not so much, but if people are prepared to spend a small fortune on the fifth floor of John Lewis, then why not make them.
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Community Resilience
a view to improving the experience of the
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London Fire Brigade does with the London Data Store. Every fire and rescue service will use its fire data to help it target its fire prevention work, layering it to varying degrees of sophistication to hone in on vulnerable groups. This is a fine contribution to the Smart City. The Smart City is citizen centric; the targeting work of fire and rescue services is proactive, frequently done in partnership with other public authorities and focused on members of the community. But that is not enough. The Fire and Rescue Service is not just a provider of data for its own consumption or for use by others in the bid to develop the Smart City. The Fire and Rescue Service has assets: it owns buildings, it has vehicles and it has people, in some cases, thousands of people interacting in cities 24 hours a day. What can these assets contribute to the Smart City? Consider the Fire and Rescue Service as an asset in the Smart City and how it can contribute to improved citizen experience. If the John Lewis fifth floor can inspire those with money in their pockets to improve their own safety through investment in the safe, smart home, then imagine what the Fire and Rescue Service can do to invest in the safe, smart city. All of this and more will be explored at a CFOA Briefing event on May 11 at GMFRS Training Centre. For more information visit: http://cfoaservices.co.uk/events/cfoa-smart-citybriefing.html
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New York State of Mind Ben Wellington is an academic from New York City with a passion for opening up public data. Ben shares, through a very entertaining 10 minute TEDxNewYork talk from 2014, the story of the New York fire hydrant. Through an FOI request to the city of New York, he accessed data about parking fines in Manhattan. There are city laws about parking near fire hydrants and where they are violated, the NYPD can issue a parking ticket. He noticed that two hydrants located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan amassed between them $55,000 worth of parking fines. On closer inspection of one of these two spaces, he noticed that the road markings were not clear and that it was obvious how drivers were continually being caught out. He wrote to the Department of Transportation advising them of his findings and within weeks the space was repainted to make it clear that cars should not park there. For Ben Wellington, this is a victory of open data: find the publicly available data, analyse it and make sense of it to work out the wrinkles in public policy. For the Smart City, the example demonstrates how much rich data exists in public organisations, but is not always easily available or accessible to the citizen. Fire and rescue services produce a lot of data. They send it off to government and it is aggregated into annual statistics. Some will share datasets with local data portals, like
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Working together to support safe and healthy communities
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Group Manager Chris Kirby, FRS/Health Collaboration Project Lead, West Yorkshire Fire and Rescuer Service, reports on hosting collaboration workshops with local health partners
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ealth professionals from across the county met at West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service Headquarters to discuss how agencies can work together to improve health and wellbeing in the communities we serve. West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service (WYFRS) hosted the collaboration workshop, which welcomed delegates from across the health sector, including Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), local authority public health,
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Mental Health Crisis and Urgent Care, NHS foundation trusts, Yorkshire Ambulance Service and Age UK. The workshop was held with a view to WYFRS revising its prevention strategy in a move towards including health and wellbeing checks, as well as fire safety. The revamped strategy will also include improved referrals to support services and increased support for people across a range of health issues.