Home is Where the Smart is

Most of us are now aware of the Smart City concept whilst few still fully understand it or even how to start working towards it. For me the issue lies partly in the use of the word City, which immediately excludes the vast majority of councils, but also the focus on the technology, devices, sensors and the data. Whilst these are undoubtedly important, without understanding the why, what or the how behind them then it very quickly becomes another IT project destined to fail.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group report on Smart Cities gives some good background (with little detail) on what a Smart City is or should be but is very high level and doesn’t give the necessary detail to make this of use to most areas of the UK, but does lead the way in discussing the fact that it’s not necessarily about the technology.

So how do we make it relevant for all. Well firstly drop the word City. Then secondly we need to strip the concept right back to actually understanding what the issues are in the areas in which we live and the problems that we want to solve. I have a huge issue with ‘New’ Smart Cities, i.e. one’s built in the desert with lots of technology embedded in them. Unless you’re solving a known problem then how Smart can you really be.

I had the pleasure of attending the launch of “Ten Essays to Shape the Place of Future Places’ by Stride Treglown recently. The launch was headlined by Duncan Cadbury discussing the Bournville Village Trust covering both the history and the work they are currently engaged in.

What struck home was how relevant the vision of George Cadbury over 100 years ago still is to today’s society and how with the addition of technology could improve the lives of citizens up and down the country.

Before I jump straight back to the technology lets first take this back to the concept of the home. George Cadbury sought to provide decent quality homes in a healthy environment, something that is core of a councils ‘business’. The Local Government Act 2000 states that councils have a general power to ‘promote economic, social and environmental well-being’ and fundamentally under a range of different services the home is still core to this.

So what do we already know about the home that could help promote well-being for our citizens and how can we match this to Smart and technology.

Well first off, we know where the home is. And if we know where it is then that means we have access to all sorts of geospatial data about the area in which it sits. This could include socio-deprivation data, topography, access to parks and leisure facilities, local amenities, take-aways, betting shops and more.

Moving back to the house itself, we know all properties have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), we know the rough value (sites like Zoopla help this), we know the Council Tax Band, whether single person discount is applied, we’ll have voter registration information and should there be children of school age we’ll hold attainment and attendance information too. Just using these sets of data (assuming we have agreement to do so) starts to give us a very good view into a household, its make-up and the area in which it sits.

Multiply this over multiple homes across an area and you can start to gain a real insight into the area in which you operate and start to understand the issues that are affecting lives and wellbeing.

To begin to move this into the area of Smart, we can then add more subsets of data to this picture of the home and its surrounding area.

These could include Public Health data from Public Health England that covers a multitude of illness and health issues, and Public Health reports by councils. Agreeing a standard to operate to for making this data geospatial would benefit this more but it can work in its current guise. Again moving on a step and going back to location means we can now plot roads and now utilising Smart sensors we can also monitor traffic flows on those roads, air quality around the area of the home and weather on a micro-climate level.

So given all the information we now have we can see how traffic, air quality, deprivation can all impact on health and well being and start to look at the interventions that can be put in place to improve quality of life.

This may be as simple as planting trees between a road and a housing estate, to the cycle schemes of Groningen, to improving traffic flows to reduce emissions around pollution hot spots. By understanding the issues of the area then you can start to make Smart decisions about how to improve them.

Moving back to the home we know have a range of Smart devices that can also add to the wealth of data already accessible about the home. These include such things as Temperature monitoring (Hive, Nest), Light Levels (there are many studies on the implications of this), Energy and Water Usage (Smart Meters) and with today’s social care IOT sensors even Movement, Eating (when are fridges and food cupboards opened) and waking times are possible to monitor.

Whilst this may come across to some as a bit ‘big brother’, understanding this data when mapped to the previous sets and then compared across regional divides or differing areas of deprivation can again give a real insight into how people are living their lives and we can start to correlate both positives and negatives that impact on health and wellbeing, both physically and mentally.

And yet there still more, as a council you will hold benefit data, possibly employment data, resident ages, social care, homelessness, maybe even waste data, how much from an area is recycled, how much green waste comes from an area etc. The list of data that relates to a home or a location is nearly endless but each bit is part of a jigsaw of data that can provide a valuable insight into the interventions required by the council to improve the lives of the residents it serves.

With the right permission from residents there is also no reason why you couldn’t the also map health data (fitness trackers), food / shopping data (after all the supermarkets collect this everyday in return for a voucher!), data on journeys to work (bus, train, walking, car), location of work, salary bracket and even ‘happiness’.

Why is this important?

Understanding the impact of the home environment is key to ensuring citizens have the best chance of living a healthy and happy life by delivering the right intervention at the right time.

To give an example we could look at a school boy or girl whose grades are failing and attendance records are declining. In today’s council this information will be available to the school and the education department only and it’s unlikely that they will have access to any other council data, nor will it be looked at. In this instance decisions will be made without the full information available. We know from studies that schools are designed to give children the best environment for learning. This can include lesson length, recreation time, class size and light levels.

However, most children then take homework home and do this in a completely different environment. Now what if that environment was noisy (road traffic), cold, dark potentially damp and let’s say the child also has a number of siblings. Now compare that environment to a child who goes home to a large house, that’s heated, large windows, in a cul-de-sac and has no siblings. Who’s getting the best advantage? With the correct data and understanding of the issue it may well be that the issue isn’t the child’s effort, but the location of where they do their homework.

If the homework is therefore of a poor level and that child feels despondent then this could lead to worse attention in classes and eventually lack of attendance. At which point the solution could be twofold, first could sit with the housing department to intervene in the home, sort the damp, improve the heating and fit double glazing to soundproof the windows. This is a one off capital cost with no direct return on investment but could provide huge long term benefits to the child. The second option could be to then run a homework club at the school and have the child do their homework in an environment designed for learning.

This is hypothetical but can show how data from a wider source could deliver more direct and better interventions than by using siloed departmental data.

The same information held could help Planning, looking at the impact of new housing estates or developments could impact on the surrounding areas, traffic and micro climates and maybe change the way we plan these.

What are the problems?

Where to start….. I can’t cover all the issues but a few key ones are below:

Permission to use the data will always be forefront in any problem relating to citizen information. Most of the data mentioned in the above is already available as open data. Recording and keeping personal data will always be the choice of the citizen but by showing tangible outcomes of using the data and making Smart concepts a reality rather than a theoretical concept to many will help with this.

Data standards and data quality will also have an impact on this. Part of the core message around moving councils to a single platform in order to collect data in a useable and shareable format and removing silo’s of data and applications that can’t speak to each other without expensive API’s. Currently most councils are set up to deliver services vertically through single services instead of horizontally or pan-council. The same home or household will touch a council in multiple areas and have data held in multiple systems. Creating that single view of the household will alleviate this and help councils deliver better services and interventions to its citizens.

Funding — who pays for what and who benefits the most. Taking the homework example above, should the education department pay the housing costs or should the housing department pay. The beneficiary of keeping the child in school and in an environment where they thrive may have long term benefits to both health and social care too. Once you bring the CCG or NHS into the model the funding becomes even more complicated. One of the key recommendations of the APPG report is:

Develop Return on Investment models which recognise that smart solutions apply across departments and silos

This is vital in encouraging all government services in acting in the best interest of the citizen and not ring fencing their own budgets or savings. Until the funding model is fixed the concept of Smart Cities will remain a concept for most. However, every council, whether large or small can start to take steps as above to move to a Smart model with the home at the very heart of it.