We will show that even in the most conservative and isolated industry sectors new services can be created or additional value gained through combination of the following project partners’ M2M/IoT data sets:-
- Horstmann Controls- 'smart grid' and ‘intelligent home’ data/control from their commercially deployed smart meter and energy management products.
- Docobo-telemedicine remote patient care M2M data to/from from their widely deployed 'Doc@Home' (TM) home medical hubs plus connected medical sensors (blood sugar, heart rate, respiratory metrics etc).
-Scisys bring example environmental and road transport monitoring data from previous projects on flood sensing networks, and road monitoring from a Highways Agency remote self-contained camera project. SciSys can access Earth Observation data and are a Met Office partner with access to 'severe weather warnings'.
Stage 1- Information Sharing and present situation capture
- We will hold a number of group meetings to share knowledge of the data sets and data paths in the 3 industry sectors (healthcare/telemedicine, transport infrastructure and energy management). University of Bath experts will question the sector representatives as both data users and data providers to determine their needs. We plan to also interview external end data users to ensure the internal and external views of needs are the same.
- During this process we will determine where IoT data is generated, the value of it to the organisation and the customer, and the manner in which it is addressed / referenced back to an individual, a location or an object.
- We will also identify specific pieces of data as test cases that would be valuable to others in delivering improved outcomes (new services, customer benefits, information for decision making, reduced costs etc). The industry representatives will be challenged how to share these in real-time and the human and corporate behaviours, commercial considerations, limitations on use, addressing and anonymity issues etc will be noted.
- At the end of this stage we will have developed a common understanding and have documented the actors, the present value chains (seen from multiple viewpoints), the barriers and issues.
Stage 2- Collaboration between the sectors to improve resiliency to extreme weather.
In this stage the industrial sectors will be challenged to show how, by working together, they could improve the UK response to a theoretical ‘extreme weather event’ at a personal, company and national economic level. This study context is entirely relevant to the TSB’s value creation aims- climate change is predicted to make extreme weather events more frequent and severe, the number of people living with one or more chronic health conditions (often weather effected) is rising due to demographics and scientific advance, and increasingly renewable energy sources are replacing older nuclear or coal fired ones leading to increasing supply instability.
We will examine how the present organisations can take a step towards the converged world by, say, the use of weather warnings from the Met Office or environmental sensors to trigger a weather alert. Information & advance warnings can then be pushed to the most vulnerable patient groups by Docobo- to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD) or asthma sufferers for fog; to frail patients with a history of falling for ice or snow. Checks on medication levels, food, energy credits, oxygen supply can be made and stocks replenished before the weather event hits, minimising patient risks and emergency hospitalisations. Smart home technology data from Horstmann controls fused with health records can identify houses where an elderly occupant is at risk of hypothermia. The broker could alert local carers (friends or neighbours) to visit. Further, in the event of power shortages the broker will ensure the vulnerable are protected from load shedding to the maximum extent.
Stage 3- Extracting the learning from the severe weather example
Value, benefits, barriers, costs, security, trust, privacy, response time and related issues will all have been discussed in considering how the 3 industries could work together to deliver the improved weather resiliency. These will be documented and used to identify the data value chains and determine the characteristics of a system through which data and related transactions could be exchanged to build these and many other services
Stage 4 – Towards the demonstrator
The attributes and desired characteristics will be used to inform the broker design and possible realisation paths. Key considerations will be what services it should offer, identification and certification mechanisms, levels of data classification, access, payment and reward mechanisms. Finally a useful intermediate step tackling a challenging but practical subset of the full attributes will be identified as a demonstrator proposal.