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Smart City Demonstrators

One of our demonstrators is a collaboration with the city of Helsingborg, where device management and automatic updates are used to track stolen bicycle batteries, and to deploy software updates to bicycles for other smart city integrations.

Bicycle scenario, Helsingborg

The city of Helsingborg provides home care services, where personell visits patients in their home, and they use electric bicycles to travel around the city. By fitting these bicycles with a small computer chip, they make a good platform for experimentation and research in the smart city landscape. Raspberry Pis, for example, are small enough to fit on the bicycles and can host multiple interesting sensors, such as accelerometer and gyroscope, light and sound sensors, altimeter and GPS. We can apply our research into device management, automatic updates and vulnerability analysis to this system of bicycles to develop useful prototype for the smart city. For example:

• Tracking batteries: Unfortunately, the batteries in the bicycles have become a priority target for thieves. With some force, the batteries can be pried off of the bicycles, and often several batteries per week go missing. In an attempt to combat this trend, we want to equip the bicycles and the batteries with GPS trackers, such that they can be monitored by staff, and give alarms if a battery is removed from its bicycle. This was the initial issue that started our collaboration with Helsingborg.
• Bumpy roads: Measuring quick acceleration and movement can potentially help to detect potholes or poor road quality in bicycle roads.
• Poorly lit areas: Light and sound sensors can potentially help to find areas that are poorly lit, or map noise levels in the city.

Short, improvised recording after demo at the H22 expo at Campus Helsingborg, Lund University on June 7-10. Language is Swedish.