Council points to plans to upgrade operations for urban traffic management and telehealth services
Bristol City Council is preparing to launch the second phase of the implementation of its Smart City Operations Centre.
It has begun to look for a partner in the commercialisation of the centre and development of relevant services.
This follows the completion last year of the first phase, which involved setting up the centre and building a business case in which other public service providers contribute to the cost, provide data and receive its outputs to support their operations.
The council, which has been one of the leaders of the smart places agenda in the UK, has indicated that it wants to build an operating framework and implement the first projects to use the centre in improving local services.
Urban traffic management will be the first integration – currently at the proof of concept stage – with telehealth likely to follow.
Identifying innovations
It said that phase two will involve identifying and prioritising possible innovations, along with building prototypes and implements. This will involve the Operations Centre team along with other council staff and partner agencies including Bristol is Open, the University of Bristol and local emergency services and clinical commissioning group.
The centre was developed to replace three previous control centres that focused on traffic controls, housing concierge and CCTV in public spaces, and telecare services.
The centre takes data feeds from a range of sources, including CCTV on the roads and public buildings, automatic number plate recognition cameras, air quality sensors, and devices used in telecare packages, such as smoke and security alarms and panic buttons. These combine with the council’s open data platform and Connecting Care, the electronic patient record provided by the local clinical commissioning group.
Barney Smith, the head of the centre, told UKAuthority in November that it has ambitions to harness more internet of things technology to support the smart places effort.
Image from Bristol City Council
