How will the coronavirus change our life in the city and how will the trend towards an individual approach accelerate the emergence of new technological solutions? Answers to these questions are being sought by Nikolai Dubinin, host of the Industry 4.0 Youtube channel.
In New Zealand, city services have begun widening sidewalks to give more space to pedestrians and cyclists.
In the American cities of Boston, Minneapolis, Oakland and Philadelphia, some streets are being introduced without cars. Now people can breathe fresh air while maintaining the required social distance. Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, added an additional 72 miles of bike trails for the same reason.
Consulting company KB Strelka in the article «7 ideas for adapting the city to quarantine” offers to create an application for going to the park. It will allow you to book a small section of the park or a walking route for some time. Entrance to the park will be via a QR code on the smartphone screen. The system will also provide statistics on the number of people near you.
There is something similar in Al Mamzar Park in Dubai. At the entrance, all children are given bracelets that track their location and receive calls. So parents can be calm – it is impossible to get lost. Drones monitor the trees, and they also control the safety of people on the water. And in Singapore, according to blogger Ilya Varlamov, today drones are used to estimate the number of people in parks.
Quarantine shows that much of entertainment, education, and even medicine is available right at home. You can also work remotely. In the future, this will affect the demand for public transport.
What development paths are there now:
UAVs
Organization of their movement using AI algorithms
Imagine: you live outside the city, but you need to go to Moscow on business.
The regular bus does not go to your village, because people work remotely and do not go to the office en masse – everyone has their own schedule. You go to the application and make a request: “By 19:00 be in Luzhniki.” The algorithm offers several options: a taxi, an electric train, a car, and… an unmanned mini-bus. That is, the AI compares your request with the requests of other users from your area and generates a charter flight. The bus will take you and your neighbors to the city.
Even before quarantine, unmanned shuttles were tested in Singapore, which can be called through the application. Exactly the same story was in Helsinki, where also through the application, passengers could share trips on minibuses. They did not have mandatory stops, the technology optimized the route as much as possible for specific requests.
The McKinsey agency formalized these new requests in the study “The future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal.” Experts suggest that a contactless economy awaits us, where everything related to online sales, automation and telemedicine will be in demand.
The British company Thriva sells kits for home blood sampling. Analyzes, however, will have to be sent to the laboratory by courier or mail.
A more technologically advanced option is from Matternet, which in March introduced platforms for delivering analyzes using drones. It is planned that drones will work around the clock, fly 20 km and deliver cargo up to 2 kg. The company is already testing its technology with UPS and Swiss Post.
In a smart city, it is not the patient who goes to the doctor, but the doctor who sees online deviations in the patient’s indicators and contacts him, even before he gets sick.
In New York, this service has been part of the state medical program Medicaid since 2016.
In Singapore, an experiment was conducted with “smart” t-shirts that connect to an application on a smartphone and record data about the user: heart rate, calories burned, number of steps. The state can use this system to monitor the condition of patients.
In Moscow, a hospital in Otradnoye launched a technology for monitoring patients based on artificial intelligence. The wards where patients with coronavirus lie are equipped with cameras that track how many times the medical staff came, whether they are wearing the right protective suits, how much patients move, etc. This technology will continue to be tested after the epidemic.
What else to read on the topic:
- The post-coronavirus world: Will we face an epidemic of anxiety and depression?
- Telemedicine has been around for a long time. Coronavirus has infected the masses with it
- Pandemic as a stress test: which industries will develop because of the virus
- Faster, wider, smarter: what will be the city of the future
- Moscow 2030 – smart city
- Smart cities: what technologies make urban spaces smarter
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