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Today, there are new IoT deployments springing up all over world ranging from intelligent factories (IIoT) to smart cities. But deploying IoT devices and setting up communications between them across large areas can involve logistical challenges like accessing convenient mounting locations and tapping into suitable power sources. One solution is to take advantage of existing infrastructure (e.g., city lamp posts, telephone poles, etc.) and update or enhance it with the latest technology to solve new and different types of problems.
Putting this idea into practice is Juganu, an Israeli-based technology company with offices in the U.S., Brazil, and Mexico. Their Smart Street Light platform is a smart lighting solution that is installed on existing streetlight poles where each light integrates wireless communications, a sensor hub, full HD visual sensors, audio sensors, and compute capabilities at the edge. Juganu’s Foam solution, supports a digital ecosystem network built around these integrated smart lighting devices which effective creates a distributed array of sensors, sensor hubs, and IoT devices with a wide range of capabilities, all backed by a cloud or local (on-premise) central management and control system.
We recently spoke with Juganu to learn more about this exciting technology. In this blog, we’ll share some of those learnings including additional insights about their solution, real-world use cases for their technology, and how technology from Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI) helped to make it a reality.
Use Cases
Juganu says their Smart Street Light solution is suitable for both outdoor environments ranging from small areas to city-wide regions, and indoor environments (e.g., smart buildings, retail, horticulture, etc.), and can address a wide variety of smart-city IoT use cases like automatic meter reading, traffic light management, waste management, etc.
Their smart lighting devices integrate numerous types of sensors spanning visual, audio, and environmental, along with video streaming capabilities, which can all be fused. For example, visual sensors that identify signals of distress can be combined with audio sensors that can corroborate the visual signifiers of distress and send alerts to emergency services. Depending on the set up and available bandwidth, these smart lighting devices can also provide a video feed, while environmental sensors can measure parameters like air pollution, people and vehicle density, soil moisture, etc.
Juganu provided us a number of examples of how these resources, when coupled with the Smart Street Light’s onboard compute functionality, can be used:
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An Intelligent Street Light for the Real-World
Juganu says that one of their goals has always been to transform public spaces into safe environments through innovative light technology. They want their lighting technology to be a common platform for smart public spaces, and to enable the most advanced services to help people have better-connected, simpler, and safer lives.
Juganu noted two particular installations of their technology which highlight that the company is meeting its goals:
In Mexico City, the installation of Juganu’s smart lighting devices has resulted in a vast improvement in safety. The brighter, more consistent lighting created means that nearby parks and public transit hubs are well-lit, helping pedestrians feel safer walking and traveling at night. The smart lighting devices in this installation also integrate embedded optical sensors which detect distress and have helped to improve response times to incidents in the area.
In another example, these smart lighting devices were installed at the Friendship Bridge connecting Brazil and Paraguay. The bridge itself is over 550 meters long and crossed by approximately 100,000 people and 20,000 cars every day. As a critical border crossing, the bridge also plays a crucial role in anti-trafficking initiatives by Brazilian security. Juganu’s smart lighting installation allows officials to monitor known trouble spots and identify suspicious patterns in activity. The platform’s far-edge computing also processes large streams of data in real-time, turning it into actionable insights to improve ongoing operations, while maintaining privacy.
In addition to these examples, Juganu also worked with QTI to install their Foam and smart lighting devices at the Qualcomm Technologies headquarters in San Diego as part of an initiative to build the Qualcomm Smart Campus.
Building on Juganu’s Technology
Developers can build applications on Juganu’s technology framework using Juganu’s SDK and HDK. To ensure that the security and integrity of the network is maintained, developers will need approval from Juganu to obtain these resources.
With these resources, developers can access either raw data or data which has been processed by the framework in the following four categories:
- City Objects: a variety of common elements throughout a city (e.g., parking spaces, people, lighting, traffic, traffic lights, audio, building, doors, etc.).
- Data Sensing technology: cameras, microphones, gas sensors (e.g., carbon, CO2, etc.), automated meter reading, and edge analytics.
- City Data Sources: data generated by city objects. Data providers can include human notification systems (e.g., 911) or any other city events.
- City Service: business intelligence that analyzes a pre-defined set of city data sources and generates reports, conclusions, actions, etc.
At the hardware level, Juganu collaborated with QTI to utilize our chipsets within its smart network technology in order to provide an AI engine, edge processing architecture, and fast connectivity. Chipsets used by Juganu to achieve this include the Qualcomm® Internet Processor IPQ8065, Qualcomm® QCA9984 and QCA9500 Wi-Fi chipsets, and the Qualcomm® QCS605 system-on-chip.
Conclusion
Juganu says that smart lighting assets can provide the technological base for many new ideas and new technologies. And when combined with a strong technological infrastructure and the right data, there are certain to be new types of applications developed for these devices in the future which haven’t been thought of yet. More generally, Juganu says that in the same way the inventors of the mobile phone couldn’t have conceived the world of technologies created by their invention, Juganu sees a world of infinite possibilities using smart lighting assets and infrastructure.
One thing for certain is that the use of IoT and smart cities are poised for rapid growth over the next decade, as evidenced by some reports which estimate the global smart city technology market alone to reach $1.7 trillion dollars by 2028. Certainly companies like Juganu with their integrated smart lighting solutions backed by technologies from QTI, are showing what’s possible tomorrow, through real-world uses cases today.
For additional information, check out the Juganu website, and be sure to contact them to learn more about how you can develop custom applications on their hardware.
Qualcomm IPQ8065, Qualcomm QCA9984, Qualcomm QCA9500, and Qualcomm QCS605 are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
