Beyond Smart Phones: Sensor Network to Make 'Smart Cities' Envisioned

Editor's Note: Then on to Nano Cities 

Science Daily

Thanks to numerous sensors, Smartphones make it easy for their owners to organize certain parts of their lives. However, that is just the beginning. Darmstadt researchers envision entire "smart" cities, where all devices present within municipal areas are intelligently linked to one another.

Computer scientists, electrical and computer engineers, and mathemati­cians at the TU Darmstadt and the University of Kassel have joined forces and are working on implementing that vision under their "Cocoon" project. The backbone of a "smart" city is a communications network consisting of sen­sors that receive streams of data, or signals, analyze them, and trans­mit them onward. Such sensors thus act as both receivers and trans­mit­ters, i.e., represent trans­ceivers. The networked communications involved oper­ates wire­lessly via radio links, and yields added values to all partici­pants by analyzing the input data involved. For example, the "Smart Home" control system already on the market allows networking all sorts of devices and automatically regulating them to suit demands, thereby alleg­edly yielding energy savings of as much as fifteen percent.

"Smart Home" might soon be followed by "Smart Hospital," "Smart Indus­try," or "Smart Farm," and even "smart" systems tailored to suit mobile net­works are feasible. Traffic jams may be avoided by, for example, car-to-car or car-to-environment (car-to-X) communications. Health-service sys­tems might also benefit from mobile, sensor communications whenever patients need to be kept supplied with information tailored to suit their health­care needs while underway. Furthermore, sensors on their bodies could assess the status of their health and automatically transmit calls for emergency medical assistance, whenever necessary.

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