InSecTT Project: Enhancing Safety in Smart Cities

The research project provides solutions to a wide variety of industrial domains, like Health, Smart Infrastructure, Urban Public Transport, Aeronautics, Automotive, Railway, Manufacturing, Maritime, and Buildings. In the context of smart cities Wapice’s key research topics have been sustainability, safety and wellbeing of people in urban environment, so it felt natural for us to join the project.

The project is structured to work packages and use cases, where each partner contributes to the project by investigating their research topics. Work packages are like building blocks, which form the foundation for innovations that can be then tested and verified in use cases. In the use case ‘5.6 Location awareness for improved outcomes and efficient care delivery in healthcare’ led by Philips research, Wapice has together with Philips investigated how to improve the safety especially in urban environment.

While cities are generally very safe, accidents and emergency situations still happen. In these cases, the ability to react quickly and take correct actions saves lives. Knowing the facts – where and how many people are involved – immediately helps to understand the overall situation and plan the correct measures. In this Wapice’s key research items in InSecTT project, AI and machine vision systems, come to help.

Today’s urban environments have a lot of cameras that are not utilized to their full potential. By using Wapice’s solution the video camera stream from existing infrastructure can be processed and used not only for counting people and assets, but to detect threats and situations that can lead to accidents. For city decision makers this is crucial information. Knowing the places and patterns where and how dangerous situations happen helps to invest in locations, where it really matters and where it is most needed to improve safety and prevent accidents.

In InSecTT project we used Wapice’s IoT and AI platform IoT-TICKET to build a demonstration environment, where research partners could easily join and bring in data. Together with Philips, we tested and verified integration of smart RFID triage sensor tags. As Philips had predefined the information exchange format for triage data it was easy to integrate sensors to the IoT-TICKET using standard MQTT protocol. In their research case, Philips wanted to study if traditional triage forms, which involve time-consuming manual steps, could be replaced by a digital triage solution. Optimally, this solution would enable emergency personnel to efficiently prioritize, locate and monitor victims at the emergency site and during transportation to the hospital.

We also successfully tested integrating localization solutions from other research partners. It surprised us how accurate for example the ultra-wideband solutions already are in indoor situations. A major project finding was that as the potential for gathering IoT information in the healthcare field expands rapidly, there is a growing need for a versatile, user-friendly, and robust context information management platform where data can be collected, post-processed and visualized easily.

It was not long after the project started when Covid-19 hit, and it was unsure how collaboration in project would work. Now that the project approaches its end, we can tell that despite the challenges the project was a real success. Skipping some face-to-face meetings was mandatory, but by establishing active remote meeting practices we managed to build good collaboration with other partners. We at Wapice want to thank all InSecTT partners for this exceptionally well-organized project that enabled us to study cutting edge technologies together with leading European research organizations. Now, when generative AI is disrupting the world, we at Wapice research are already planning the next research topics. Stay tuned for more!

Wapice was founded 1999 in Vaasa Finland, a major energy technology hub in Nordic region. Since the beginning we’ve offered close technology partnership and digital services especially to industrial customers. Today we provide cutting-edge software, IoT and AI solutions for leading companies around the world. We are an ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 27001 certified company and master all relevant technologies related to digitalization.

Besides tailored solutions, Wapice owns and develops products, like Industrial IoT platform IoT-TICKET that enables operational efficiency and business model innovation for industrial companies and Summium Sales digitalization platform which helps to streamline especially the quotation process for B2B products.

Since the beginning we’ve invested heavily in research activities and we have experience from several ITEA, EU and national research projects. Today, our research activities are geared especially towards artificial intelligence in several domains. We are always willing to hear more if you have an interesting research idea, to which we could contribute.