IIIT Hyderabad holds round-table on healthy smart cities

Gachibowli: The Smart City Living Lab, IIITH, organised on Thursday a multi-stakeholder round-table discussion on healthy smart cities to bring in perspectives from government, technology partners, frontline workers, academia and start-ups for a better understanding of how cities and technology players are responding to the pandemic and to get valuable insights and address it collaboratively.

As life after Covid slowly eases back to normalcy, governance and management of organisations/workplaces/schools/government need to understand the best practices and be equipped with the best solutions for managing the safety and wellbeing of citizens. A position paper was made and published on the discussion, solutions and next steps.

A K Garg, senior director, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said "reaching out to the market has always been a struggle. The concept of reaching the market and demonstrating the solution can only be accomplished through a living lab that provides a test environment for solutions to be tested and an environment for ecosystem players to come together and demonstrate a workable solution."

The key focus of deliberations was to understand when we get back to work/school, public transport/spaces and markets and how to make it safe. Various concerns that need to be addressed for effective and safe reopening and functioning of schools, work, public spaces were discussed, and valuable recommendations were made.

Some are real time updates with sensor network deployment, live monitoring and screening, mandatory periodic screening, SOP guidelines and training in place and real time tracking. Solutions discussed were for early detection and mitigation of Covid aerosols from air. Standard SOPs will also play a major role in use for smooth reopening of institutions.

"The spirit and essence of the living lab was wonderfully captured in our round table discussion. Due to great moderation by NSN and excellent engagement from all participants we were able to get very meaningful insights which can help us create impactful solutions that can be demonstrated in the Lab. Looking forward to many more such initiatives", said Vincent Van Noord, Director, European Business and Technology Centre (EBTC).

"Thought leadership is an important aspect of the Living Lab. This roundtable is the first of many we are planning towards engaging the stakeholders for the benefit of the larger ecosystem," said Prof Ramesh Loganathan, Co-Innovation and Head Research/Innovation Outreach at IIITH.

Panelists included Dr Garg, Dr Chinnababu Sunkavalli, consultant surgical oncologist, Apollo Hospital; Dr Ashish Srivastava, CEO and MD, Dehradun Smart City PMC, Manish Kothari VP, India, Silicon Labs, Dr Prabhakar Bhimalapuram, Assistant Professor, IIITH; Priya Prakash CEO, Healthset Go,Rajesh Kumar, Additional Director, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Sukanto Aich, whole-time director and board member, business leader-systems and services, Signify; Venkatesh Narasimhan, senior director (engineering), Silicon Labs; Vikram Murty, Foundation for ISHRAE, founder member, past president, ISHRAE.