New Zealand smart city projects have won awards in four categories of IDC’s Asia/Pacific’s 2017 Smart City Asia Pacific Awards (SCAPA) 2017, beating Singapore which won in three categories.
New Zealand projects took out the awards in the Public Works; Smart Grid; Connected Health; and Tourism, Arts, Libraries, Culture, Open Spaces categories. Australia scored two awards, being joint winner in the Land Use & Environmental Management and the Education categories.
IDC associate market analyst, Jefferson King, said: “New Zealand has been a front runner of Smart City projects in all three years of these awards. Despite its size, New Zealand is punching well above its weight by delivering high quality, innovative Smart Cities projects, as evidenced by these awards.”
The New Zealand winners were:
NEC in the Public Works category. NEC in collaboration with the Wellington and Christchurch City Councils developed KITE, a standardised sensing platform that supports economic and environmental council initiatives by collecting sensor data. The platform gathers information on air quality, water quality, pedestrian mobility, waste management, parking, street lighting, solvent detection, and graffiti detection.
Unison Networks in the Smart Grid category. Unison Networks has developed a long term smart grid strategy, which includes using a range of sensors to improve performance and to enhance asset utilisation throughout the Unison Network. The smart grid will help minimise customers’ long term costs while maintaining their power quality needs.
Qrious in the Tourism, Arts, Libraries, Culture, Open Spaces category. The Qrious Voyager portal uses big data and analytics solutions to analyse anonymous mobile location data. Voyager provides interactive tourism insights across New Zealand through an intuitive web portal.
Waikato District Health Board in the Connected Health category. SmartHealth is a Waikato DHB free online health service. Patients download the HealthTap app to connect to healthcare professionals across the region by video, voice and text link. It provides a knowledge base of doctor-approved health information, access to online doctors during evenings and weekends; and online appointments with hospital specialists without leaving your home. It’s particularly helpful for people living in rural areas who have poor access to doctors or have to travel long distances for short hospital appointments.
IDC says it went through a rigorous six-phased benchmarking exercise to determine the top smart city projects. “These included identifying and cataloguing the key smart city projects in Asia/Pacific by IDC analysts across AP [excluding Japan] (25 percent), online voting to determine public opinion (50 percent), and the assessment of an international advisory council (25 percent).” There were 18 winners chosen from 46 finalists.
