Speaking about Smart Cities is not futuristic. In cities such as Málaga is already a reality. Hundreds of electronic devices, also called beacons, scattered through the entire city, gather different information that can be useful to enhance the efficiency of cities and improve people’s lives. And, could there be any better beacon than we ourselves, the people? We always carry a device with more than 30 sensors, our smartphones. Shouldn’t we make the most of this?
It is therefore necessary to create an application aiming to gather the information from the sensors in the citizens’ phones and to send it to a central repository to analyze it and make them available to the public as open data, so that everyone can use them for their own benefit.
Málaga CitySense
That platform already exists. The group TOPdigital, through its accelerator Sprita Startups, in collaboration with the Málaga City Council and Telefonica R+D, has developed Málaga CitySense, a project that, by means of citizens’ participation, aims to generate collaborations among users through a mobile application.
This initiative allows the user to act as a sensor, by giving the chance to collaborate actively in the generation of open data thanks to the sensors of smartphones. Málaga CitySense uses the current technology of smartphones and offers the opportunity to share information related to temperature, humidity, noise, mobile signal, etc. in a safe and anonymous way with open data from the city council. That way, any entity longing to make a report can have access to them.
Furthermore, thanks to this application, users can have interesting information about the city in real time about mobility, cultural activities, tourism, jobs, business promotion or data from the city council. Users can also make their complaints in the section “Happening now”, where images and information about the state of traffic, incidences or events can be uploaded.
This application, which can be downloaded from Google Play, has been developed thanks to the platform FIWARE. Currently, it is only available for Android devices. Here you may find a demo of the app:
