ITC560 Emerging Technology and Innovations

Introduction

Although IoT smart cities implementation has emerged with several benefits in urban areas especially in terms of productivity, efficiency and sustainability, it has also introduced brought about many challenges on its implementation. Considering the fact that this technology has emerged in an era where cyber-security is a major concern, it is without any reasonable doubt that this technology will be among others on the receiving end of cybersecurity threats. For that matter, we can classify the major challenges facing this technology into three categories; vulnerability to attacks, security and privacy concerns, lack of skills needed to correctly interpret massive data and lastly the problem of interoperability. Excluding the last two, the first two can be comfortably put under cybersecurity concern bracket (Petrolo, Loscri & Mitton, 2017).

Major IoT Smart city applications and the challenges

Healthcare 

In its invention, IoT smart city technology was aimed at making it possible for urban residents to be able to locate ambulances easily through the online platform in case of emergencies, check the availability of blood and organs for transplants if need be and enable remote monitoring of patients under health programs as well as tracking the hospital beds among others (AlEnezi, AlMeraj & Manuel, 2018). This was totally a superb idea until the privacy issues were considered bearing in mind that health status should remain private. When we consider the US federal laws, in the Privacy Act which was passed in the year 1974, individuals are guaranteed the rights of protection against unwarranted invasions to their privacy which covers the collection, maintenance, usage and disclosure of their personal information. This is similar to almost all the other privacy laws in different countries including Australia (Eckhoff & Wagner, 2017).

This new technology of Smart cities will allow the authorities to have a track record of people’s locations at all times through the use of video feeds in the entire cities where it has been adopted (inside the busses as well as stores) and which will apply facial recognitions sensor technologies to achieve that. It’s important to note that, despite of the fact that individual activities may be carried out publicly; such information can never remain private (Mehmood, Ahmad, Yaqoob, Adnane, Imran & Guizani, 2017). For example, people will always need to visit HIV clinics for testing, visit psychiatrists as well as abortion clinics. But who would dare do that knowing that he or she is being monitored somewhere by somebody who he does not know? Definitely people will shy away from some of these incidences which are likely to interfere with their privacy especially when under circumstances like these ones and that will definitely have negative impacts of the country’s health sector.

Public Transport and Traffic

Through IoT smart city technologies will make public transportation more efficient for both the government and its citizens. The public will be in a position to monitor what is going on the highways as well as the arrival of trains and buses through GPS sensors which will be installed in the vehicles at the manufacturing level (Ahmed, Yaqoob, Gani, Imran & Guizani, 2016). On the other hand, drivers will also stand a position of monitoring traffic jam in different roads through special sensors which will be placed on different parts of the roads and that will enable them make a choice of the routes to follow in order to escape the traffic jams. On the side of local authorities, the technology will be used to control traffic lights which will in turn alleviate traffic in the roads. Still, the information from the sensors placed on roads will be utilized to help in rescuing people in times of accidents.

Well, this appears as a great milestone as far as public transport will be concerned until we consider the impacts of this technology on the security of the country. I mean, all the security enforcement team relies mainly on the road transport to respond to criminal activities across the country and for that case criminals will have an easy time if they manage to gain access to the monitoring systems being used by the transport authority because they will be in control of all what the police officers are doing to stop criminal activities (Alur, Berger, Drobnis, Fix, Hager, & Rexford, 2016). Considering the fact that currently hacking of systems is not a big deal, criminals will only need to invest in hackers to gain access of the monitoring systems and through that way they will have the freedom to continue with the criminal activities since they will be monitoring the policy officer’s reactions from a distant to navigate escape routes.

Environment Conditions

In its invention, IoT smart city technology was aimed at providing healthier environments for the urban residents. To achieve that goal, networked sensors would be deployed across all the city streets to monitor all the environmental hazardous activities taking place in the city such as greenhouse gas emissions and noise pollution (Zhang, Ni, Yang, Liang, Ren & Shen, 2017). This data would be used to devise ways on how to reduce pollution and other environmental hazards through the enactment of policies by the local authorities. Well, that was great considering that global warming is becoming a major threat to agricultural sectors of different countries.

However, considering that in city streets there is a lot of activities taking place, monitoring the streets may result into an increase in crime rates all over the country (Menouar, Guvenc, Akkaya, Uluagac, Kadri & Tuncer, 2017). For instance, bank ATMs are found in those streets and people have been used to withdrawing money at any time of the day. If criminals gain access to these monitoring systems, the criminal activities will have to escalate because what they need to do is just to invest in the monitoring process to ensure they get to know people who are withdrawing lump sum amounts of money and then they can follow them even out of the major towns where there is monitoring to the outskirts and then steal from them.

Conclusion

Generally from the above discussion, it is clear that IoT smart city technology will have considerable benefits as far as health, transport and environmental sectors are concerned. However, the technology has also appeared with its own challenges as far as privacy of citizens and security agencies is concerned and if not closely monitored will result into uncontrollable crime rates within the countries of implementation.

References

AlEnezi, A., AlMeraj, Z., & Manuel, P. (2018, April). Challenges of IoT Based Smart- Government Development. In Green Technologies Conference (GreenTech), 2018 (pp. 155-160). IEEE.

Ahmed, E., Yaqoob, I., Gani, A., Imran, M., & Guizani, M. (2016). Internet-of-things-based smart environments: state of the art, taxonomy, and open research challenges. IEEE Wireless Communications, 23(5), 10-16.

Alur, R., Berger, E., Drobnis, A. W., Fix, L., Fu, K., Hager, G. D., ... & Rexford, J. (2016). Systems computing challenges in the Internet of Things. arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.02980.

Eckhoff, D., & Wagner, I. (2017). Privacy in the Smart City—Applications, Technologies, Challenges, and Solutions. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 20(1), 489-516.

Mehmood, Y., Ahmad, F., Yaqoob, I., Adnane, A., Imran, M., & Guizani, S. (2017). Internet-of- things-based smart cities: Recent advances and challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(9), 16-24.

Menouar, H., Guvenc, I., Akkaya, K., Uluagac, A. S., Kadri, A., & Tuncer, A. (2017). UAV- enabled intelligent transportation systems for the smart city: Applications and challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(3), 22-28.

Petrolo, R., Loscri, V., & Mitton, N. (2017). Towards a smart city based on cloud of things, a survey on the smart city vision and paradigms. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 28(1), e2931.

Zhang, K., Ni, J., Yang, K., Liang, X., Ren, J., & Shen, X. S. (2017). Security and privacy in smart city applications: Challenges and solutions. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(1), 122-129.