During the IoT Week conference that took place from 17 to 21 June in Aarhus, Denmark, Martel found a novel way to showcase Orchestra Cities to event attendees and the general public. Visitors could interact with a Lego model of a city district and directly observe the results of their action.
Orchestra Cities is a citizen-centric platform, prioritizing the needs of city inhabitants such as security, mobility, health and efficiency. The platform also serves the needs of public officers and business operators.
On the Lego model, running a model car along the street would trigger the street lights, while parking spots and charging stations for electrical vehicles would show their availability and car battery status with LED lampposts.
Other sensors on the Lego model embedded in buildings and roads captured environmental data such as sound, air quality, temperature and humidity. The two waste containers by the side of the street could sense their lid position and fill level.
Dr Giovanni Rimassa, Martel’s chief innovation officer, was present at the booth to receive conference participants and illustrate the connection between the Lego model and the Orchestra Cities platform.
“The Lego model helped people to experience the capabilities of Orchestra Cities in an immediate and fun way.”, Rimassa said. “Visitors experienced for themselves the powerful combination of sensor data and scenarios that make up a Smart City context. While everyday Lego-life goes on in the model, continuous data streaming to our open Cloud-based platform happens behind the scenes. We have five micro-controllers and more than 10 sensors from multiple vendors embedded underneath these bricks.”
Visitors could see all this data on various Web dashboards, shown on a computer screen, as well as accessing it directly through a QR code to scan with their phone camera. A home page provided an overview of the current air, traffic, and waste situation, while drill-down views focused on time history and statistics of specific data series.
Martel’s CEO, Dr Monique Calisti, highlighted the core approach and values underpinning the Orchestra Cities effort during her welcome speech at the panel on IoT for Smart Cities and Communities. “The three dimensions of openness that we advocate and practice with Orchestra Cities are key enablers for the adoption and success of human-centric Smart Cities. Open standards ensure inter-operability and level the playing field, while Open APIs create an ecosystem where no provider can terminate the value chain just to extract rent from it. Finally, access to open data compounds and amplifies the reach of the information the city gathers from its sensors.”, Calisti said.
To know more about Orchestra Cities click here: www.orchestracities.com
