Latin America. One of the most fundamental missions for city leaders is to provide an infrastructure that allows citizens to live and work safely and efficiently. We are at the beginning of a new evolution in the city's infrastructure.
This evolution has the potential to have the greatest impact of all, as it can harness the creativity and innovation of all citizens but in a way that benefits the masses. This is the evolution of the urban digital infrastructure that allows us to see, hear, feel and smell the key information of the entire city.
Parts of this infrastructure are already working: video cameras help with traffic flow, environmental sensors check air quality, microphones calculate gun fire. Today, each of those sensors is deployed to solve a very specific problem and user. The problem is that deploying sensors with a special purpose is very expensive, plus they have not been designed to empower citizens more broadly.
Urban infrastructure must be accessible to all. As long as things like sidewalks and wagons or water or power systems are used by everyone, their costs are shared widely across all the people who use them. What if we do this with other infrastructures in the city?
The conduit for this is a technological infrastructure that is all around us every day: lighting. LED luminaires with microphones, vibration sensors, public wi-fi, cameras and other sensors that can be shared for many purposes and with efficient costs, are creating a common digital infrastructure that functions as a nervous system for a city or company.
Lighting is everywhere. In the United States alone there are about 327 million smartphones, very few if we compare them with the 7 billion light fixtures! As for fixed physical infrastructure, no other technology platform compares to the universal character of lighting and its ability to adapt to smart connected solutions.
LED use is projected to go from 28 percent today to 95 percent by 2025, which will be able to reduce the cost and complexity of energy in commercial enterprises. Sensors embedded through this lighting network will move data everywhere and will be possible through ge Predix's platform, a cloud computing platform designed specifically for the secure collection and analysis of data from real-world sensors.
Cities will maintain control over the type of data and the amount of data that will be shared with different user groups, but once the infrastructure is in place, new solutions can be created more quickly. For example, recently a city asked us to analyze pedestrian crossings to make streets safer. We hadn't made any solutions for this, but we were able to create code that solves this need quickly. Like that, we know there are countless other applications that we haven't even thought of yet.
That's why we're building digital infrastructure as an open platform and actively recruiting partners and application developers who can leverage data to solve problems and innovate applications.
The opportunities presented to us are enormous, but if cities keep thinking about technology as a way to solve one problem at a time, great opportunities will be missed. It's time for digital infrastructure to impact cities as the open path to economic growth and prosperity.
Text written by John Gordon, Director of Digital Affairs at Current, powered by GE.
