Future Cities Catapult Limited Public Funding

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Brazil is the largest country in South America with over 200 million people and São Paulo is the largest city, with over 12 million people. Due to a rapidly ageing population in Brazil, providing effective and affordable healthcare services to elderly and vulnerable people is a growing healthcare challenge across the country. We are working with hospital clinicians at Albert Einstein Hospital in São Paulo to develop a technology platform for remote monitoring of chronic disease patients, enabling real-time healthcare intervention outside of hospital and at scale. This will use a patient smartphone App to help the patient to comply with the careplan set by their doctor, including reminders for taking medication, medical readings and making appointments, as well as personalised diet and exercise options. A linked doctor App will support the doctor to make actionable decisions about the patient’s health based on real-time patient information. This will improve healthcare and quality of life for people with chronic diseases, and also reduce hospitalisation and healthcare cost, supporting UN SDG 3 – Good Health and Wellbeing. The patient App will also recommend options to patients to improve health based on their medical condition and overall health status by raising awareness of local services and activities that can help them to live healthier and better lives. We are also developing a City Explorer web application that heatmaps the São Paulo neighbourhoods of Bom Retiro and Higienópolis according to how accessible local services, such as healthcare and transportation, are for residents with different mobility options, such as walking, public transport, and private car. This can also be extended to a larger scale. We are engaging with stakeholders in city planning, such as urban planners and developers, so they can use the City Explorer to gain increased insight into the most effective ways to improve the reach of city services to meet the needs of local communities optimally, based on differing demographics. This supports UN SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities. We are strengthening the relationship between the CityZen project partners by sharing knowledge, skills and experience across all partners and by developing a commercial agreement for all partners. Through the CityZen website and by running workshops locally, we are developing a CityZen network to strengthen the healthcare and smart cities ecosystem in São Paulo and Campinas City and help Brazilian organisations to make international links. This supports UN SDG 17 – Partnership.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Given the aging demographics and rapid urbanisation, cities need to be equipped to respond to emergency 999 calls more quickly. By 2050, over 25% of the UK’s population will be over 65. This has implications on the overall health services as well as the NHS Trust to cope with anticipated rise in ambulance call outs amidst worsening urban congestion. Presently, the Government has set out targets for ambulance services to reach 75% of emergency calls within 8 minutes. “LIfe First Emergency Traffic Control” or “LIFE” seeks to develop an innovative application for an intelligent transport system that operates in real-time to enable ambulances to reach life threatening emergency cases quicker by integrating ambulance route finder applications with traffic management systems. LIFE seeks to reduce the time to respond to emergency calls, thereby saving lives, whilst operating a resilient service with a cost and fuel efficient fleet. On a larger scale, LIFE will benefit the UK as it will design, develop, pilot and refine a new application that can be easily integrated with existing systems in emergency vehicles and will enable emergency services to enhance what they do best, which is saving lives.

The Amey led project aims to reduce the impact of street works on the Citizen, minimise the total cost of ownership of the highway asset, introduce a new local authority scalable service spanning multiple functions utilising a smart city data platform and make joint works the norm and not the exception. This truly collaborative street works project will be driven by Staffordshire Highways with support from Staffordshire County Council and all the major utility companies. The research stream is being led by the Future Cities Catapult and Staffordshire University, with the BSI assisting with the new data standard for underground assets. This project will drive a benefit case for local authority adoption of city data platform based shared services. The technology will be based around CSC's Omnilocation and Elgin by Roadworks.org, while Tenshi Partners will work with the digital community to exploit the platform on behalf of the local community.

Environmental, economic and social data will be used to address the urban challenge local authorities face: the need to improve energy performance of the built environment, to help alleviate fuel poverty related health issues and improve the local economy. This project is a feasibility study establishing how publicly available built environment, energy and social datasets can be used and personalised to plan mass retrofit and to provide targeted low carbon measures across the city. Combining datasets to map information on buildings and particular local needs, a new value proposition develops allowing local authorities to plan targeted retrofit schemes involving community groups, local energy technicians and retrofit businesses. This results in a wider roll out of retrofit measures, cheaper retrofit delivery and more effective outreach to vulnerable residents. The visible outcome will also be an easy to use prototype online tool, free to community groups and paid for by local authorities, that facilitates this planning and delivery process.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

The Future Cities Catapult is a global centre of excellence focusing on the challenge of urban innovation: how cities can take a more cohesive approach to the way that they plan and operate. Integrated urban modelling is a key capability to achieve this, integrating human behaviours, such as social activity and mobility, with the design and management of the built environment - streets, buildings, utilities and parks. In urban systems and policy-making, decisions are typically dependent on one another, however, this is seldom reflected in the way today’s models are developed and applied. These models are often created and applied in disciplinary silos, they are disparate and disconnected using data at different levels of detail, sourced at different times and stored in different formats. This leads to inefficiencies across city planning, design and operation. Even when integrated, they are done so in a bespoke way, requiring subsequent integration with other models to be started again from scratch. The key innovation to be delivered by the project will be the creation of an open source digital connector for the integration of both hard and soft models, datasets and visualisations without the requirement for fundamental reworking of the models or reconstitution of data inputs. A modular framework will be constructed around the digital connector to facilitate development and fusion of existing and future models. The framework will also allow for models to be coupled and decoupled in various combinations once developed, ensuring extensibility. The key technical challenge is the identification and specification of standard frameworks for data, integration of different types of models and visualisation of solutions to identify dependencies and reuse inputs and outputs. The connector will be a set of data schemas, interfaces and services that can be used to integrate models in a consistent way. We will apply the connector to various challenges in our partner cities and towns, which include Leeds, Greenwich and Milton Keynes. We will test and validate the techniques, processes and software to integrate different data formats, model types and visualisations. For delivery, we are partnering with Space Syntax, a leading SME providing economics, planning, and design consulting, who bring spatial network models of over 50 cities and 10 regions, and more than 8,000 locations of pedestrian and cycle movement in 22 cities. The code developed will be Open Source (OS) and the intellectual, modelling and data frameworks will be openly published and managed via the Urban Modelling Institute (UMI), an organisation created as part of the project to ensure continued updates and legacy of the work developed. This will enable a community of relevant academics, industry experts, software developers and end users to guide and further develop the tools, and importantly, develop new products and services, as well as provide consulting services around them.

Awaiting Public Project Summary