Smart Dublin, an initiative of Dublin City Council and the other Dublin Local Authorities, encourages the creation of solutions to address city needs, with an emphasis on using emerging technology and public data available through Dublinked – Dublin’s open data platform. Smart Dublin has identified mobility, environment, energy, waste and emergency management as priority challenges. The initiative recently partnered with the Science Foundation Ireland networks research center – Connect – and Intel to deploy low-cost sensors across the capital to monitor rainfall, weather conditions and river levels.
The new sensors will communicate data wirelessly to Dublin City Council’s operations team who will analyze water levels and take appropriate action. The second phase of the project, led by the CONNECT Centre and Dublin City Council, involves scaling these river and rainfall sensors to more locations around Dublin.
Jamie Cudden, Smart City program manager on the Dublin City Council, said, “Dublin is emerging as a leading location for Smart City and IoT innovations. Intel’s Dublin Living Lab Program has already carried out some initial flood monitoring activity across the city which has led to the prototyping of a set of river and rainfall sensors. Projects like this demonstrate how low-cost environmental sensor networks can be scaled to generate useful and actionable flood data for communities living across the city.”
Connect Director, Professor Linda Doyle said, “The new detectors make use of a new communications technology called LoRa which is a low power, wide area network. The Internet of Things is about installing low cost sensors on everyday objects and connecting them to the internet for information exchange and communications. This opens up all sorts of possibilities in terms of tracking, monitoring and management. This Smart Dublin initiative is a good example of how IoT can be of practical benefit to citizens.”
