The digital capabilities of a Smart City can improve the citizens’ service levels, such as medicine, education, video surveillance and public transportation. 

By 2050, the United Nations estimates that 70% of the world’s population will live in large cities. This means that more than 5 billion people will be grouped in just 3% of our planet’s living surface.

This estimate, among the several certainties it brings implicit, suggests that humanity will be worryingly overcrowded, and if the Covid-19 pandemic has taught something, it is that overcrowding and high population density are factors that increase contagion and, consequently, mortality.

Therefore, in view of this demographic trend that seems inevitable, the solution to confront and contain a future pandemic is found in the development of smart cities.

South Korea implemented strategies that considered the permanent monitoring through a mobile app, which allowed tracking the equipment owner via GPS. This prevented the health personnel move and, thanks to GPS tracing, authorities could ensure that the person did not leave the assigned isolation site.

On the other hand, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, they were able to reduce the time between the tests and their results, and if they had a positive it was possible to get all the recent information about the patient and notify anyone that he had contact with.

Public services and digital solutions

The case of South Korea is a sign of what can be achieved in health terms, taking advantage of the technological and digital potential of a Smart City.

When the goal is to confront and stop a pandemic, telemedicine establishes a new paradigm when it comes to patient detection, diagnosis and care. Thanks to the GPS of smartphones, movements tracking can be conducted in real time, which means controlling physical contacts and quarantined areas. In addition, the use of wearables with sensors capable of monitoring vital signs such as oxygen saturation, pulsations and temperature, will allow, using Machine Learning tools, to provide information to a health center to identify sick people and provide them medical care in a timely manner.

Also, we can move towards preventive telemedicine, recording the food buying and consuming habits by people, an information that supermarkets already have available thanks to their loyalty programs. If someone tends to buy foods high in sodium or fat, the healthcare system may get ahead of the curve and set probability levels for future medical appointments.

In addition, the digital capabilities of a Smart City can improve the citizens’ service levels, such as video surveillance and public transport.

Thousands of cameras are already available observing the movements of passers-by, but what is missing is to process that data quickly and efficiently. This work still depends on people and, therefore, has limited capacity. However, if you have the possibility of crossing the information between different databases, which provide residence, workplace, travels and regular schedules data, it will be possible to determine whether an individual’s displacement involves an abnormal behavior. After this, the monitoring, and if necessary, a timely action of law and security bodies may be instructed to avoid any type of activity that could violate the law, such as the transfer of a quarantined area or sanitary cord.

In the area of intelligent public transport, advances in IoT and autonomous vehicles will make travel in a given geographical area faster and more efficient, avoiding traffic jams and higher traffic times, which will reduce crowds of people. This will also facilitate the monitoring of movement restrictions, and for those who are required to move, the same transport device will recognize the number of people allowed, in addition to having temperature sensors to identify users with high potential to be ill.

But not everything will be limited to pandemic containment in a Smart City; we must also ensure that key services, such as school and university education, continue to be provided in the expected time, form and quality.

To do this, teleducation will use virtual reality to preserve the experience of a face-to-face class. The rest will have to do with learning methodologies design that take advantage of the features and potential of more powerful and versatile devices, and of faster and more stable connections.

No doubt, Smart Cities will be a reality, and these new dimensions for the everyday services we know will be possible thanks to the ability to process huge amounts of digital data, and this through a solid, extended and dynamic network of telecommunications infrastructure, designed to support 5G and higher networks, with efficiency and stability.