Application of Crowd Sensing for Sustainable Management of Smart Cities

Abstract

Cities are key contributors to the climate system alteration and the urban environment is, in turn, significantly affected by the climate change effects, such as the increasing occurrences of extreme weather events, which compromise citizens’ life quality and health status. Nevertheless, hubs of economic and innovation and have the potential of leading the needed green transition by implementing effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. The high heterogeneity of the urban environment requires the implementation of site-specific and targeted actions that need to be supported through fine-grain data collection of the most significant environmental parameters such as air temperature and pollutants concentration. Recent advances in sensor technology and data communication capability allow to conceive the active participation of citizens in the urban environmental monitoring process, moving the analysis to a human-centered approach: citizens become, at the same time, vectors of data and target of data-processing that could be used also for boosting the required behavioral change of individuals and increasing resiliency of territories and communities. Wearables are already implemented for the smart management of the healthcare sector and their usage can be easily extended in the coming future for a better management of other sectors involving citizens’ everyday life.