Internet of Things: Sidewalks Collect Data on Infrastructure

Brief

Digital dashboards embedded in sidewalks collect data used by Uncharted to create a city’s digital twin. The data helps cities make decisions about their infrastructure and find more sustainable solutions to transportation and other infrastructure needs.

Insight

By now, you’ve definitely heard everyone from government officials to journalists (including yours truly) speak to the importance of shoring up sustainable infrastructure, sometimes referred to as “the built environment.”

In the context of this essay, sustainable infrastructure involves developing and updating roads, buildings, water systems and energy structures with due consideration of the economic, social and environmental implications. But addressing all of this requires a multitude of solutions.

New York-based Uncharted’s approach centers on prioritizing the collection of data about community infrastructure needs in real time. Knowledge of this data would allow a city to update its operational systems — from broadband access to road repairs — in the most efficient and sustainable manner. But how?

Uncharted installs digital dashboards a few inches into the ground that sense and collect different types of data. The dashboards are then used to create a “digital twin” of the city, consolidating the management of the entire community’s infrastructure in one space, an accompanying software program.

If we want to get technical (which we do because this is Climate TECH Weekly), the in-the-ground dashboard is a platform as a service (PaaS) that can house an entire city’s monitoring and management information in one place. And the information is all collected via the tech inside the city’s sidewalk. Seriously.

Citing the ground — sidewalks — as an accessible area to house a city’s internet of things (IoT) operations, Uncharted creates and paves a sustainably sourced polymer fiber around the dashboards in place of traditional cement.This material is designed to allow easy access for repairs or subsequent updates by engineers to the single-board computers and power cables placed within while still maintaining the durability and sturdiness of normal cement for everyday use.