“What the [Intel] sensors give us an opportunity to do is to look at the whole picture. So we move beyond just looking at the traffic issue, and start to get a broader picture of what’s going on, and explore other areas of air pollution that today haven’t really been thought about,” says Ned Johnson, Principal Environmental Health Officer at Enfield Council, Greater London.   

The London Living Labs is a city scale environment that is instrumented to enable experiments to be carried out in situ. It has been established by Intel, the Future Cities Catapult, researchers at ICRI Cities and a collective of local stakeholders in the city.

The environments include schools, parks and city neighbourhoods, which are instrumented using an Intel Galileo-based end-to-end Internet of Things infrastructure and informed through an ethnographic research process. Our multi-layered, people-centric approach helps us to better understand and design for a range of scenarios and use cases with communities, city officials and stakeholders to help design for the connectedness and sustainability of future cities.

 

The current installation base is 120 gateways servicing about 600 sensor end points. Locations include Hyde Park, Enfield, Brixton, Elephant and Castle and Tower Bridge. Further deployments are in progress in Manchester, Peterborough, Dublin and San Jose.   

The low cost Intel gateways developed to connect a broad array of sensors are providing a steady stream of data which is contributing to a quantified community. Building an end-to-end solution that supports the addition of heterogenous sensors and the hooks to allow developers to build tools and services via the Mashery-based API allows us to quickly prototype applications and support interventions in the community.