Smart cities are made up of municipalities that use information and communication technologies to increase operational efficiency, share information with the public and improve both the quality of government services and citizen welfare.
The smart city vision stands on certain key pillars:
- Timely, accurate decision making
- Lower costs
- Lower risks, and
- More visibility, flexibility, and control
Smart city applications use technology to deliver on these outcomes. A smart city app aims to harness the wealth of sensor data to provide powerful analytics, insights, and smart decisions, and that’s where they face some formidable challenges.
Smart city challenges
One of the biggest challenges is the heterogeneous mix of technologies and data sources. The city has both age-old legacy infrastructure as well as cutting-edge cloud and IoT enabled devices and equipment. This complex mix of electronics, communication technologies, and software verticals makes smart city apps difficult to build and deploy.
It’s a struggle to manage the disparate data sources and ingest the various types of data they produce. There exists a dire need for a unified platform that can abstract these complexities and seamlessly turn the sensor data into contextual, actionable information in real-time. That’s where Nivid’s N-Sense fits in.
The N-Sense platform converges multiple technologies into one platform. It is a horizontal platform that uses a global perspective for data and turns data from a myriad of sources into useful, contextual information for people to act upon quickly and effectively.
How the N-Sense Platform Works
The N-Sense platform has a modular, flexible, and scalable architecture and a horizontal model that allows you to easily integrate as many vertical services as necessary. This is the secret sauce of this platform that enables it to support the development and deployment of powerful smart city apps for a wide variety of use case scenarios – from smart lights to waste management; from smart emergency medical systems to intelligent water systems.
The platform supports fast, scalable data collection. For a given use case, the data gathered from various sensors or any other kind of external data source are transported over a suitable communications network and then stored in local servers. Once there, they are normalized, homogenized, and processed in the platform to obtain information suitable for decision-making processes further down the line.
This information can then be accessed and visualized by any application, whether it’s built in-house or by some third-party. The N-Sense platform offers open APIs that third-party applications can utilize to access the processed data as well as other capabilities of this feature-rich platform.
Smart City applications made easy
The N-Sense platform simplifies the smart city applications by manifold. Applications can take advantage of the open API ecosystem to access and deliver on top of the platform’s key capabilities:
Data Analytics
N-Sense has a powerful data analytics engine that transforms the collected sensor data into contextual information for decision-makers. The insights based on the city data is presented through different charts and graphics. City authorities can use these to take action more quickly and efficiently. The city can anticipate and proactively address issues and challenges that translate into significant cost savings.
Real-time sensor maps
Applications can utilize the platform’s real-time location-based data maps that visualize the location of the sensors and other data sources generating the torrent of data. The N-Sense SmartWaste application, for example, utilizes this feature to enable you to track the average fullness of your container and therefore, identify containers that need emptying.
Dashboards
The platform offers intuitive dashboard features for reporting and visualizing contextual information.
Alarms and Notifications
App developers can define custom alarms that can be generated by the devices or automatically when analyzing the received data. Once the alarm is generated, custom notifications can be sent to the person in charge of reacting when an exceptional situation occurs.
The N-Sense platform implements a profile-based user control mechanism to define and restrict access to the platform features. This secured, feature-rich platform can simultaneously support multiple city councils, private and public agencies, emergency taskforce, etc. To learn more about how N-Sense realizes the smart city vision, contact our experts.