The smart streetlights will have gunfire detection, air quality monitoring, electric vehicle charging, and other features.
Microelectronics company Infineon and LED street light manufacturer eluminocity are joining forces to develop a new IoT connected streetlight.
According to the companies, the new streetlight will offer a scalable sensor hub, connectivity with support for 5G deployment, and data processing. The light is designed to help urban planners tackle the issues of infrastructure, traffic management and energy consumption. The companies say it is able to serve as the backbone of a smart city.
“The behavior and needs of city dwellers will rapidly advance due to digitization. For this reason, our hard- and software updates make the streetlight future-proof,” said Sebastian Jagsch, CEO and founder of eluminocity. “The intelligent streetlight can accommodate new sensors as well as new components for mobile communications. This enables us to constantly develop new applications to tackle upcoming demands. We enhance comfort, safety, security, and efficiency in public spaces, thus making whole cities future-proof.”
The companies will combine their expertise in sensors, power management chips, security, data analytics and system integration to develop the light. They’ll partner with other firms for connectivity and cloud solutions. The light is advertised as secure from end-to-end and both the hardware and software are easily updatable.
The LEDs are energy efficient and the companies say they could save cities over 2,000 GWh annually, enough to power 630,000 households for a full year. In residential areas the lights will be equipped with electric vehicle charging stations, as well as traffic management and parking-spot detection sensors.
There will also be sensors that can monitor environmental conditions and adapt to them. In bad weather or when vehicles or pedestrians approach, for example, the light would automatically brighten. The sensors would also monitor air quality and send the data to the cloud for analysis.
Microphones would also be incorporated into the design to monitor and automatically report auto accidents and gunshots to the nearest police station.
