Improving public infrastructure with Helium and Milesight IoT products

The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be everywhere. It will open a world of new opportunities and it will allow us to make everything “smart”. One of the big topics for the expansion of IoT is using it in cities and improving public infrastructure. There are already quite a lot of projects all over the world which are making this a reality.

For example, the University of the West of England is developing a network of sensors to gather data from the London Bridge station. They will monitor humidity, temperature, strain pressure and can even detect leaves on the tracks. Machine learning algorithms will process the data and will forecast potential maintenance and other tasks to be done.

Madrid already has several IoT projects. They cover garbage collection, recycling, monitoring green spaces. In Los Angelеs there is a big network to govern traffic lights and to improve the overall flow of traffic. In UK’s Milton Keynes, there’s a IoT network monitoring the water and energy consumption and optimizing distribution accordingly.

Public infrastructure is a massive business. In 2021, the US federal government announced major plans to spend $621 billion for roads, bridges and rail improvements. Another $174 billion are for EV infrastructure. There’s also yet another $100 billion slated for high-speed broadband network. All of those money will be used not just for maintenance and construction, but are also slated to be invested in smart city lighting, green technologies, traffic management systems, improvements to public systems and more.

That’s great, but is it worth it?

On paper, these IoT projects will bring longer lifetime to the equipment, better performance and lower costs. They will save time and will improve the overall quality of life, along with actually saving lives.

IoT systems are capable of providing actionable, real-time data. With that councils can improve decision-making, maintenance, planning, sustainability and cost optimization among other details.

Some companies are already specializing in this area and developing products for smart cities and smart infrastructure. One of them is the leading IoT manufacturer Milesight. It has built a portfolio of IoT products specifically designed for a variety of public infrastructure projects. And they are already being used in various cities all over the world.

Love the idea? You can make it a reality easier than ever. A lot of Milesight’s devices and sensors are LoRaWAN compatible. This means you can use them with the Helium Network which is already available in most big cities around the world.

And you can use these IoT devices and sensors for personal or enterprise projects, too. For example, you can have a system to count and govern the parking spaces in a mall parking lot. Or you can install air quality sensors in the air circulating system of your office building. The possibilities are endless. Here are a few real-world examples.

Hong Kong’s air quality in rental housing

Hong Kong is a unique city with lots of challenges. It’s one of the most densely populated and financially unequal cities. As such, there has been a public rental housing program there since 1980. In order to improve public health the city authorities have built an IoT system to measure air quality in the apartments.

They are using Milesight AM300 Series sensors which are capable of measuring 9 factors – CO2, PM2.5 and PM10, temperature, HCHO, TVOC, O3, barometric pressure humidity and more. The Hong Kong Housing Authority and the Department of Health use the data to monitor the buildings for overall quality of life and take measures if indoor air quality is poor, thus improving the health of the citizens.

The same sensor series is also used in some hospitals. One of the added benefits is reducing the spread of Covid-19 via quality, real-time air quality monitoring.

Improving city lights

Proper lighting is crucial for the city night life. It is also very expensive and difficult to maintain. Also, there’s plenty of room for optimizations. LoRaWAN sensors are a great choice as they are reliable, easy to deploy and low cost. Milesight has a whole system developed which includes the UR35 router and the UC11-N1 node. Depending on uses, you can also add the UG85 Gateway, too.

Next, you can add various sensors to light poles, including IP cameras, environmental sensors and light sensors, too. This way street light poles become part of an IoT network. At the very least, sensors and measure the ambient light and reduce or increase the LED lights brightness accordingly. As a result, the street below will always have adequate lighting and energy costs will be optimized.

Cleaning up the city properly

Waste and garbage management is one of the biggest and most complex challenges for any city. With IoT it can be much easier to handle and organize. Milesight has developed a system which uses an ultrasonic distance and level sensor EM310-ULD along with the UG67 LoRaWAN gateway and the Milesight IoT cloud platform.

The system is then able to be used in a variety of applications. For example, it can monitor the level of which garbage bins are full. The route planning software then will allow the waste company to choose the best possible route for the garbage trucks to pick up the full bins and avoid trips to ones that aren’t full. It can also schedule additional trips if bins are about to overflow quicker than usual.

The same sensor can detect the presence of a vehicle in a parking spot, thus making light work of parking lot counting and improve the overall traffic. And it has high accuracy to avoid wrong vacancy reporting.

And yes, you can employ the same sensor to also monitor sewer levels and even the position of manhole covers. All of this will have 24/7 accurate, real-time data reporting, making sure everything is working as it should at all times.

Basically, if you can think of something in a city or public infrastructure that can or will benefit from an IoT solution, chances are, there’s already a product available. And it would be one that’s low-cost, low-energy and easy to deploy. As such you can expect that IoT devices and sensors will be broadly used in more and more cities to improve our overall quality of life.