Engaging individuals in the smart city paradigm: participatory sensing and augmented reality

Abstract

Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavor. This paper presents two novel services that bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of nowadays smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizen embedded on her/his natural surroundings. These services have been developed and deployed together with a real-world smart city deployment that will be also described. Finally, a brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built will also be presented.