“Your weight is 69.3kg. You’ve lost a little bit,” says Shirley, 67, peering at the scales that her husband Malcolm, 68, is standing on.
Malcolm and Shirley live in Kent. Both have significant health issues, and need carers to come to their home twice a day. The scales have been adapted to transmit today’s weight reading wirelessly to their computer, and – because the couple has agreed to share their data – it immediately shows up on the system of their domiciliary care provider.
Malcolm’s reading creates the latest point on a graph that tells their carer Charlotte at a glance what’s happening to his weight. In conjunction with another graph showing his rising blood sugar levels – Malcolm is diabetic – she can see that he’s not controlling his condition well enough. During her visit later that same day, Charlotte gently suggests that it might be time to lay off the sweets and biscuits to prevent his diabetes spiralling out of control.
Shirley also messaged Charlotte earlier though the system to say she suspects she has a urinary tract infection starting, so Charlotte dropped by the GP’s surgery to pick up a sample pot. If it’s caught early, Shirley won’t be dragged down by a debilitating infection: this is important, because if Shirley isn’t well the couple can’t easily cope at home and other, more expensive, solutions would have to be found.
It’s this type of preventative approach that Kent county council is hoping will reduce the need for acute medical care that’s often followed by an expensive place in a care home.
“The strategic issue is the growing demand for healthcare and the financial pressure in the context of austerity economics, together with managing the demand for care home places, which are expensive and not what people want,” explains Debbie Johnson, ICT business development manager at Kent county council. The kit required to extend the pilot Shirley and Malcolm are now trialling has just been purchased, but Johnson says that Kent isn’t rushing – it will evaluate the evidence carefully before investing further. She doesn’t expect to see big savings in the cost of delivering domiciliary care itself. Savings will come from helping people stay at home longer, reducing expensive residential fees.
Wiring up people’s homes is just one place where you can gather data in order to analyse it and take action based on what it tells you. Massive amounts of information captured from all aspects of daily life and transmitted via the internet is being analysed by different local authorities to optimise services and create cost savings. In the UK, this internet of things, as it’s known, is still in a very early phase, but Gartner’s research vice-president, Anurag Gupta, says that with UK councils having lost a third of their funding already, there’s strong impetus for radical thinking about how services are designed and delivered.
Because every council is financially stretched, no single organisation or company can make a city truly “smart”, so collaborations are needed. In Bristol, a partnership between the council and Bristol University, called Bristol Is Open, currently involves digging lots of heavy-duty cabling under the roads so that vastly more data can be transmitted via the internet. The partnership’s managing director Paul Wilson says it will be an enabler for ideas and projects that haven’t yet been dreamt up: the project aims to attract companies, ideas and people to the city to help it design services better for a soaring population, in particular for older residents with their increasing demands on health and social care services.
The internet of things “offers the ability to revolutionise the delivery of existing public services as well as unlock the potential for fundamentally new ones”, says Steven Cox, vice president and head of public sector at Fujitsu UK and Ireland. But he also has a warning for councils: “Local authorities have to ensure that their business case quantifies the savings they are seeking and where the benefits will come from – whether that’s to improve internal processes and productivity or to deliver services to citizens that reduce demand and therefore costs elsewhere.”
Evaluating the impact of such projects is, however, “very tough”, Gupta points out. He says the planning phase is critical: “You need to do some serious research into the design of smart technology, because if you don’t and people reject the technology then it won’t get used and it won’t save money.”
Looking overseas, one place that is gratefully counting the pennies saved is Barcelona, which began to introduce more intelligence into the way the city works about six years ago. It has started seeing substantial benefits in the past three years, says Lev Levin, Cisco’s director of the Internet of Everything market development.
To cope with its congestion and parking problems, Barcelona has embedded sensors for heat, humidity and pollution into street furniture, as well as deploying its own citizens – who have helpfully agreed to wear devices that capture the same information as they move about the city.
By transmitting all this data in real time via the internet to a central hub, minute-to-minute decisions can be made about reducing the number of cars on the roads, for example, to drive down pollution levels. It’s done very simply, by reducing the speed limit, communicated to drivers entering the city by digital signs. Parking management – where sensors in parking spaces can inform drivers when they are available – reduces the amount of time spent crawling miserably around looking for a slot. In Barcelona, Levin says this reduces traffic congestion by 30-40% with revenues up by $50m. Extended right across the city, the system could save nearly $67m a year.
However, deploying the internet of things can’t be seen as a quick fix: there are inherent risks involved that can’t be ignored in an enthusiastic dash towards whiz-bang tech solutions. Robert Miller, security consultant of MWR InfoSecurity, says security requirements and financial viability will need to be factored in early in the process: “Smart city solutions will likely be designed to run for tens of years to recoup the investment, and this means getting security and privacy concerns right first time.”
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