As a society, we are getting smarter and more efficient by the day. We gather and analyse information faster, we can accurately predict future events and our overall understanding of the world is constantly improving. However, though every day brings its fair share of innovations, the speed of our development goes hand in hand with the rise of new challenges.
Among those is the question of ‘How will we manage an ever-growing population with limited space and resources?‘. This is especially relevant when it comes to rethinking our cities and ensuring a good quality of life for people living in them. Bill Gates (former CEO of Microsoft) stated several months ago that one of the biggest threats to our advanced society is the risk of a brutal pandemic taking away millions of lives. How so, you might ask? Because we are moving and travelling around the globe like never before, the germs we carry come along for the ride, greatly increasing the risks of contaminating weaker individuals.
Therefore, fields like Smart City and Smart Health focus on these problems to find innovative solutions. The objective is to tackle upcoming issues linked to overconsumption, overpopulation, pollution, global warming, etc. by using and combining the latest developments in technology like the Internet of Things, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Examples of Smart City and Smart Health projects that aim to improve our quality of life:
- Several PoC’s developed during our Hackathon last year, where IoT was used for improving the mobility in Brussels.
- Creating digital twins of cities to simulate “what-if” scenarios and better anticipate coming changes.
- Population Health: the goal is to affect the delivery of care to a group of individuals with similar healthcare needs instead of treating each patient separately in order to save time and money, which effectively makes healthcare more affordable.
- The Helsinki University Hospital created a data lake on Azure tackling several objectives, with for example clinical research providing interesting results in higher patient outcome and quality.
- Digital transformation in Health with remote patient monitoring through the use of IoT and cloud computing.
- Find out more about Microsoft’s collaborations on similar topics!
Interested to know more? Or do you have a Smart City/Smart Health project?
Let’s get in touch to see how we can help you!
