Exploring the Role of Wearable Sensor Technology in the Smart City: A Comprehensive Analysis from a Civil City Perspective

• In Event: Smart and civil? Civil Society role in the Context of Technological Smart City Developments

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of cities have initiated the transition into sensor-enhanced smart cities (Aivazidou et al., 2021), as well as kinetic and responsive urban design (Dąbrowska-Żółtak et al., 2021). In this context we revisit the notion of enhanced smart citizenship and its consequences to community cohesion and empowerment.

Smart city managers aim to leverage wearable sensors, such as smartbands, equipped with advanced sensing capabilities, to gather information about people’s health or quality of urban environment, as well as facilitate data-driven decision-making processes. One can argue that wearable sensors are a crucial part of smart city systems, enabling real-time monitoring of individual and environmental data, advancing personalized services, and efficient resource management, which are the main goals of smart urban development.

As wearables continue to evolve, they hold immense potential to transform urban living and create more sustainable and inclusive communities. Potentially they can become tools for grassroots data collection and collective lobbing for better urban policies. As a result they could play a role in developing solutions tailored to the needs of individuals, like assistive systems that facilitate independent living for seniors and improved mobility or systems monitoring the effectiveness of home-based rehabilitation (Patel et al., 2012).

However, to enable smart city's involvement in promoting inclusivity for individuals with different health issues, more focus on users’ rights and preferences is necessary (Domaradzka et al., 2022). The main challenge stems from the fact that while smart city applications leverage the datasets collected from wearables, the reliability and representativeness of such studies remain problematic, and there are concerns about who really benefits from those innovations (Zuboff, 2019; Morozov & Bria, 2018).

Existing systems often end up treating citizens as sensors (Resch, 2013) rather than active, diversified agents with rights, agendas, and values that do not necessarily line up with smart city engineers’ vision. Undoubtedly, data obtained from wearable devices can help gain insights into specific urban processes and enhance services. However, if such endeavors undermine citizens’ right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968), including the right to privacy (Rychwalska et al., 2022), they become part of an undemocratic notion of smartification.

Therefore, in this paper, we critically look at the usage and implementation of wearable technology in the smart city context from the Civil City Lab Framework perspective (Domaradzka et al., 2022). We explore the challenges related to its implementation, particularly in the domains of health and wellbeing. While some examples show that ICT and IoT tools might empower many positive processes and help in linking policymakers with citizens and vice-versa, they may also contribute to the decrease in the quality of life and restriction of democratic freedoms (Roszczyńska-Kurasińska and Domaradzka, 2021). Based on the existing literature and lessons learned from EU-funded projects in which smart bands are used to collect health-related data, we share insights from integrating wearable sensors into the smart city fabric.

References:
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Authors

• Mikolaj Biesaga, University of Warsaw

• Ewa Domaradzka, Polish Academy of Sciences