Alerting will be revolutionized by IoT in smart cities

IOT AND SMART CITIES: TOWARDS A REVOLUTION IN ALERT PROCESSING SYSTEMS

Article published in lesechos.fr

By Eric Boileau, Technical Director of the IT Link Group

No more calling for 17, waiting, questions that sometimes take up precious minutes: what if digital technology modernized the way we raise the alert in order to respond more quickly and more effectively? By focusing on the democratization of IoT and the ultra-connectivity of populations, alerting is being reinvented to better fit into the connected cities of tomorrow.

Three main types of alert systems exist to date:

First, alerts sent by the authorities to the general public, especially in the event of imminent danger such as earthquakes or floods. It is in this context that the SAIP application was created by the Ministry of the Interior in the summer of 2016. Two years later, it was deactivated. This was due to malfunctions that greatly reduced its credibility, but above all, a model that proved to be ineffective: in the summer of 2017, only 900,000 people had installed it on their smartphone. However, to be effective, this type of alert must allow massive and instantaneous dissemination, which would require a contact base of several million users. This model is being abandoned in favor of partnerships concluded with major social networks, which are themselves capable of relaying an alert to their geolocated subscribers almost instantaneously, such as the Facebook “safety check”.

Then there are individual or family devices designed to prevent a list of contacts, specific to the user, in the event of a problem. In particular, they can intervene in the case of remote assistance between children and parents or for isolated elderly people. This need, which is becoming more and more important, will also be integrated by Apple into iOS12 in September.

Finally, alert systems are also becoming widespread within companies or large communities. It is then a question of ensuring the protection of agents in the field by providing a tool for responding to dangerous situations.

The main challenges of any alert system are the speed of triggering and the relevance of the response provided, whether it is a question of correctly targeting the people to be notified, or of deciding which emergency system to mobilize. What if new technologies provided new answers to these problems?

Digital technology brings a double revolution: the interconnection of populations and the generalization of sensors of all kinds within cities.

Until recently, the infrastructures at the heart of alerting were heavy, and therefore necessarily limited to large institutions, whether voice telephone networks, sirens, radios... But today, mobile networks, the democratization of smartphone applications and the rise of social networks have created a widespread and permanent interconnection.

These developments brought about by digital technology have had the effect of increasing our level of demand in terms of the timeliness of information, and especially when our security is at stake. Indeed, if we are able to share our life in real time with all our contacts around the world, it is in fact unimaginable not to be able to be instantly notified when an emergency situation is detected near us.

It is this same interconnection that, with minimal processing times and a very high guarantee of distribution, now offers alert devices new technological perspectives. Alerting mutates, is getting richer and is tending to revolutionize the world of security.

This rapid evolution is also based on the development of a technology that makes it possible to make objects interact with intelligent systems and trigger alerts without human intervention: the Internet of Things (IoT). It allows sensors capable, for example, of detecting the sound of a gunshot or the rapid rise in the level of a river, combined with algorithms capable of determining the anomalous nature of a situation, to trigger an alert.

Alert triggering systems already equip most connected cars. When an accident is detected, information is centralized and shared with emergency services, insurance companies but also with all vehicles traveling nearby in order to limit the risk of an over-accident. This type of measure fits perfectly into the development of smart cities, and will make it possible, as of tomorrow, to set up alert systems integrated into buildings, candelabras or even arranged under the roadway.

Communication, a crucial issue in alerting.

In an emergency situation, the major challenge is to ensure the rapid delivery of the message. To achieve this, alert systems must rely on all available communication networks: satellite networks, mobile networks (from 2G to 5G), but also networks that offer a lower speed but ensure a much wider geographical coverage such as Sigfox and LoRa. In the mountains as in the city center, information must be able to be delivered in real time and allow precise geolocation to be effective.

In the era of smart cities and the Internet of Things, the announced revolution in alerting systems is a major advance in the safety of goods and people both at the level of communities and businesses.