We have heard a lot about smart cities and smart homes. So, why not smart living? The major underlying thinking behind this concept is to ensure a seamless human-machine interface, where sensors, software and services come together in a highly synchronised manner for making life a seamless experience for a digital native.
SR Dattatri, Head, Digital Business at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, in an exclusive interaction with BusinessLine, shared the key element in Bosch’s technology perspective, which is ‘Smart Living’. As digital becomes more pervasive, the seamless connect between a smart city and a smart home would be imminent, he says. According to him, driven by advances in hardware technologies, the concept of smart environment is bringing about changes in the way we live, work and communicate.
‘Smart’ is all about comfort and convenience, where lights switch on and off on their own depending on the need, music comes on to soothe the senses and ACs and heaters work without human control. Bosch offers these technologies thanks to what is called Internet of Things (IoT), Dattatri explains. Bosch is already making smart homes and buildings in other markets.
“Bosch approaches the topic as smart living, with a vision to cater to the emerging trend of seamlessness in the way you live and work in the context of a city. In a modern living community, the demand for automation is for safety, sustainability and lifestyle enrichment that is highly personalised,” says Dattatri.
In a modern working campus, the needs focus on safety, sustainability, productivity enhancement and an immersive digital experience for the emerging digital native workforce. When it comes to making Indian cities smart, the focus is on solving challenges such as traffic management, transport management, parking, surveillance, pollution monitoring, and energy management.
When holistically viewed as ‘Smart Living’, one can see the inter-connect between community-campus-city, explains Dattatri. “The smart home and the smart city share a common objective — to enrich the quality of life. Hence in a living community, managing resources in a sustainable manner is high priority, hence technology adoption is high in energy, water, and waste management.”
Bosch aims to “leverage technology” to solve urban living challenges as a provider of sensors, smart home appliances, smart mobility and security solutions. It also works in the autonomous driving space. In India, smart cities are still seen as an infrastructure project rather than technology-intensive. With a highly decentralised approach, there are challenges in implementation.
“I see each city learning through this exercise and perhaps there would be the next wave of more mature, coordinated approach. We continue to work on city challenges such as traffic management, transport management, parking, surveillance, pollution monitoring and energy management,” says Dattatri.
With India witnessing a trend of upscale new community projects adopting automation, we are likely to see builders leveraging this in the real estate space.
Now, smart home features start as low as 0.5 to 1 per cent of the project cost and in the future may become the norm rather than the exception.
Bosch’s technologies for smart cities span intelligent traffic management, big data and sensors, all based on the IoT network.
Under intelligent traffic management, the solutions span transport systems, parking management, automatic generation of an e-challan and face recognition for red light violations at traffic junctions.
With increase in IoT adoption, data is generated exponentially across various areas in a city. This calls for video analytics, which is automated through minimal human intervention, with high levels of accuracy and security.
And finally, sensors will become integral to smart cities and provide data to the nearest IoT gateway. Data management and analytics will start at these gateways and provide a platform for video monitoring.