Ever wondered why many Smart Cities failed to take off? And many complaints from citizens are left unattended or service not done in a satisfactory manner?

We always thought to build Smart Cities, it must have an element of “smartness” in the cities and the citizens. Actually, every city has different priorities and thus “no city can be built with the same infrastructure and services”. The people or the citizens played the main role because they are the ones that lived in the cities. Nowadays, Smart City is built with “citizen-approach” and “citizen-focused”. No longer it’s going to be technology focused or vendor focused.

“Smaller” cities like campuses or townships have similarities. The dwellers and the occupants have issues or complaints that they want to convey or submit to the right authorities. But the traditional methods using web portals (which require lengthy Registration and manual input), emails, phone calls are no longer relevant in the era of the Internet. However, using the normal Social Media such as SMS, Twitter, WhatsApp or Facebook doesn’t help completely. The power of viral using Social Media can be helpful for the citizens but not for the Authorities. The Authorities will reluctantly solve in an ad-hoc manner to avoid any further embarrassment or tarnished image but they will have difficulty to manage reports.

We want to avoid any simple complaint to use any expensive or more important channel like the Radio or National TV to get the right attention.

Thus, Favoriot uses a “Crowdsensing” or “Crowdsourcing” method called Favorsensethat not only to receive complaints or feedback but to solve the problem in a very systematic manner. The diagram below showed how we utilize mobile applications (customised to the different needs and scenarios) to collate information from the public or private parties.

This “trouble ticket” will be generated for each individual report and submitted to the right authorities who will then filter the report, escalate and assign to the right contractors or field-force for action.

We can make a better decision making by collecting enough data. Online reports can be presented to the Management for KPI (Key Performance Indicators) purposes. Understanding the people pain-points, justifying for a new budget or human resource or even managing the productivity of the workforce.

Features

Favorsense Mobile Application (Customised based on Requirements)

• Enables public or private communities to report issues to the right authorities.
• Reports contain information such as photo, location, and description of issues.
• Reports are routed to the relevant authorities for further processing.
• Users can view cases reported and status of each case.

Crowdsensing Management Platform (CMP)

• Comprehensive management system for stakeholders.
• Allows administrator to acknowledge reports received, assign them to relevant field-force service delivery teams or contractors and update the status.
• Administrator generates a cumulative report of cases for further action.
• Reports are categorized as “Reported”, “Acknowledged”, “Resolved” and “False Report”

Field-Force

• A web application that can fit any screen; offers ease for on-site field force to resolve reports assigned to them.
• Track the status of assigned jobs.
• Records performance of the contractor assigned to resolve a particular report.

Insights

• Comprehensive dashboard and reports that detail the performance of Authorities.
• Provides feedback to management for performance improvements and focus on critical areas.
• Greater insights allow for the more effective use of resources and more accurate planning and budgeting.

Target Users

• Local Councils
• Facility Managers (Condominiums, Shopping Malls, Campuses, etc)
• Road Authority
• Environmental Authority
• Security/Police
• Housing Association
• Etc

If you are interested to know more or want to become our technology partner or business partner, please do not hesitate to contact FAVORIOT or fill-in the form below:

CYBERJAYA (January 4, 2018) – Last year, MTSFB issued a call for proposal regarding Grant for the Internet of Things Session 01/2017. There are about 59 applicants and finally, 4 organizations have been chosen as the recipients. FAVORIOT was invited for the Letter of Award (loA) Signing at MCMC on Jan. 4, 2018 witnessed by MCMC and MTSFB.

LoA Signing

The health sector has always been one of the biggest challenges for anyone and any country; economically and efficient services. Most of the time, the issues are continuous monitoring of one’s health to avoid untoward incidents. Our aging parents are the high-risk group of people as they are more susceptible to injury due to fall and sick due to their lower immunization system. In some cases, some elderly people need to be constantly monitored with their movement if they have dementia. There are many other issues related to the elderly people and these are supported by the studies and reports from all around the world.

Dr. Gopi, CTO FAVORIOT presenting the project

Favoriot is currently developing an IoT ecosystem for elderly care consisting of wearable and other connected health devices, platform, application, and analytics. The solution helps in relaying crucial information to their next of kin. The information will also be used to provide a prediction of their health so that precautionary measures can be taken. This not only reduces people worry and anxiety but also reduces the overall healthcare cost.

The solution is for the elderly people but it can be extended to other groups that require the solution. Users or people that will be using the system would be as follows:

• Family members
• Hospitals and Clinics
• Caregivers
• Nursing home
• Health professionals
• Government agencies for health

Favoriot is open to technology partners to enhance the platform and also seeking business partners to market the solution worldwide. Email: info@favoriot.com

Abstract

The aim of this project is to create an online weather system which enables a user to check real-time weather parameters of a place anytime and anywhere with just a few buttons click. In this project, a weather station will be built to collect weather parameters. Data collected will then store into Google Cloud and analysis of weather will be done. A mobile app or web will be developed to display the real-time weather conditions and users will receive notification as a reminder to get themselves prepared for their plans.

Project Introduction

Weather condition plays an important role in our daily life as weather and climate are the most ubiquitous factors for home and environment planning. Moreover, the tremendous development of Internet nowadays made possible to monitor weather conditions and collect the respective data in-situ. All the objects, sensors and devices can be linked through the Internet to share and analyze the data collected at various locations. The IoT can be much more extensive in predicting and knowing the weather conditions in particular place by connecting this weather station to the Internet.

The climate of Malaysia is so capricious that hard to predict nowadays. As people grow into a developed country with advanced technology to help humanity and bring convenience to the society, it is now the time for the weather broadcasting to be implemented into the mobile phone instead of keep on checking through only television or radio. However, with the mobile weather checking syste, we have in this era still often we see people rushing for schedule under the rain without umbrella; laundries are still showering by rain; home planted plants are wilted due to the hot and dry weather.

Therefore, the objective of this project is to create an online weather system which enables the user to check real-time weather parameters of a place anytime and anywhere with just a few buttons click. On top of that, people will receive real-time notification or reminder to get themselves prepared for their plans in the current weather.

Figure 1: Overall flow of project

Figure 2: Project architecture

Favoriot platform is chosen because it is a new cloud-based platform designed for IoT which supports the integration, collection, and storage of data from several devices into the internet. It has a scalable big data storage. It also helps developers in building vertical applications to display data in many forms. Favoriot platform is suitable to be used in this project that needs several functions provided in this platform in order to obtain desired results.

Design Methodology

There are three phases to achieve the stated objectives above:

Weather station design and prototype development

These weather parameters are measured using Sparkfun Weather Shield sensor and the Raspberry Pi 3 with built-in Wi-Fi is used to capture all the data from the weather sensor. The measurements taken include temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, light intensity, wind speed and direction, and rain precipitation.

Transferring data to initial state cloud platform

Raspberry Pi 3 will stream the data directly to the cloud. Cloud platform that are suggested to be used in this project are Favoriot because it fully managed data, supports monitoring, logging, and diagnostics, data analysis and helps developers in building vertical applications.

Application of Internet of Things (IoT)

A stream of weather parameters/information can be displayed in a professional graphical fashion which can be accessed from mobile phone or web. Favoriot also allows the development of next generation of applications of the web that is reliable, fast and engaging. Real-time notification will then be sent to the user as a reminder.

Preliminary Result

The SparkFun Weather Shield with built-in Si7021 humidity/temperature sensor, MPL3115A2 barometric pressure sensor, and the ALS-PT19 light sensor was connected to Raspberry Pi 3 as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The hardware of this project

The weather parameters such as temperature, humidity, and pressure are taken from the weather shield and loaded into Raspberry Pi 3. The weather parameters were displayed at the Lx terminal of the VNC viewer as shown in Figure 5. Data collected from the sensors were successfully streamed into Favoriot and shown in the dashboard as shown in Figure 6. However, the data streamed into the Favoriot is not tally with the data collected from the sensors as for now.  In addition, the current weather conditions are updated to multiple social media every hour to notify the user as shown in Figure 7. The number of update post can be determined by modifying the python code.

Figure 5: The weather parameters displayed in Lx terminal of Raspberry Pi 3

Figure 6: Data is being streamed and displayed in Favoriot

Figure 7: Twitter post showing the current weather condition

Expected Result

The expected results toward the end of this project are described as below:

Prototype

A prototype of weather station by using Raspberry Pi 3 and Sparkfun Weather Shield sensor is designed and developed for climatology monitoring. The weather station is able to be interfaced to the Favoriot cloud platform. Weather parameters are able to be collected and saved in the cloud.

Application

Weather parameters can be analyzed online with graphical presentation. People can access the weather-related information via mobile phone or web easily. Notifications will be sent to the users too as a reminder.

Figure 8: Expected results of Favoriot data analytics for weather parameters in (a) line chart and (b) column chart.

Figure 9: Expected results of weather app development using Favoriot platform

[Note: This project is being done by UTHM, our FAVORIOT’s University collaborator. Article was written by Pui Yan Muck]

You can check out the whole LIST of IOT PROJECTS by our University Collaborators.