Gadgetory

I'm rich brown executive editor for smart home and appliances cnet bought a house in Louisville Kentucky and turned it into a living lab to test the latest greatest smart home gadgets CNN also Lisa's an apartment in downtown Louisville one floor above a city-sponsored hackerspace called Lewy lab with me to talk more about Louisville's effort and smart technology is the mayor of Louisville mr. Greg Fischer mayor Fischer thank you for joining us here today it'll be way too rich so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the evolution of city of Louisville sort of interest in Smart City which is really kind of what this is right and and how the Louis lab came to be you know a lot of buzz obviously about smart cities and smart homes we're interested in what's the intersection of those so we can make our citizens life easier so when people talk about smart homes frequently they think about the consumer aspect of that we don't really look at our people as consumers we look at them as citizens so how can we meld that world of smart city which is open data that's out there for everybody all information from weather policing traffic how do you integrate that into a smart apartment or smart home to make our citizens life easier and also we have what we call citizen science how do we involve our citizens so we can crowdsource data from them to make a smarter City as well so the city has some ability has some some air quality sensors for example to distribute it around that we know pulling data and we've had that in the apartment actually tied into a light bulb there so if the the air quality goes bad the color will change light probably the light will change color so that you kind of get an indicator maybe you can do something about it if you have an air quality issue are there other other other other other elements of Smart City and sort of data gathering that you are particularly interested in Louisville or just in general well take it an example let's say you're a commuter you want to know how things are going to be on your drive in to work and we have a partnership with ways so we know what our traffic data is like it all all times as well obviously our weather conditions we know what that as we have cities feed for that so we've worked with Alexa and others to create an agnostic app so that you can say what if this is going on and so let's say I'm going to work and I'll say traffic's fine weather is fine so we want to make sure there's no weather issues so it just helps me plan how I can get to work easier mm-hmm so I wonder if you can talk to some of the challenges particular to Smart City data gathering getting that information out to residents how you work across social net socio-economic lines well there's there's been such an interest in smart cities but you know in Louisville especially open data so we've in it we've done a lot of experience with what we call against his sin scientist so the air quality is an example that we're in the Ohio River Valley air quality is not so as good as in other areas so if you have asthma too probably got a thousand citizens that have volunteers where their asthma inhalers have a GPS on it so we know where episodes are taking place so we can have identified the hot spots in our city so we can mitigate those hot spots with either changing traffic patterns or vegetative medicine and then we can do one-to-one health interventions as well so the more platforms we create like that where people can get involved we find very good not just for quality of life enhancement but also then in building trust between citizens and their governments so the more we can do to reach out to people to ask them to be part of a smart city environment we find people are very willing to participate in that are our hacker community our maker community love for us to throw challenges to them as well and they've really come through with a lot of solutions so that that's that's interesting that the only of crossing over from government to Indian independent Citizens may be private businesses helping to see the Smart City idea come to fruition have how has the interaction bin would say the business community and getting things off the ground here well it's been great with I'd call it the entrepreneurial community so let me give you an example of that we want to increase fire safety like every city as well that does and then we had a vacant abandoned property situation those were two different silos but when those groups got together and looked at their data together they said we've got an issue where if there's a fire at a vacant property that can be a danger obviously two adjoining properties but it takes longer for a higher alert to be called into the fire department if the property is vacant our maker community looked at that and said well what if we had a low cost fire alarm that could notify the fire department and they said that can't be done it cost a thousand dollars for the fire detector you have to have power to the house these homes are abandoned our maker community said well what if we make something that solar powered that is actually listening to a fifteen-dollar smoke detector device build a modem into that and then off it goes to the fire department and also shoots a signal up to the web as well for less so for less than fifty dollars these makers entrepreneurs created a company now it has a first of its kind for a low dollar smoke detector for vacant properties that makes our city safer is there a political element or a partisan ship element that has come to play in any of the smart city in any and any of this really I hadn't heard that before but we are in unchartered political waters so it's just a matter of time I'm sure I would imagine so so I wonder if you can speak to anything specific to the Louis lab which is sort of a brand new office right so what what are your what are you hoping will come out of that in particular well I think what's interesting about that is when you show the power of public-private partnerships so we created a innovation center with general electric appliances University of Louisville called first build in community so it's a co-located innovation space microfactory when we learned that you guys had a smart home in Louisville and then we started working together around that we said well what about the folks that are renting so we were developing something called Lewy lab where we were co-locating our performance improvement and innovation professionals were known in the country's the most innovative cities it comes to civic innovation and you guys said what about a smart apartment why don't we collate co-locate that so you're one story above our Louis lab space that we work together in that regard so that's where we really see the partnership of an opportunity seen that in this case GE appliances and the others we're working with our healthcare community for different opportunities as well and all the time we're trying to bring citizens into this loop because if we can enhance the quality of life of a citizen what that does is grow the trust between citizen and government that's something these days is being sorely tested are you looking into other cities and what they are doing either a are there any cities you feel are doing smart city particularly well right now well a lot of people are talking about Smart City applications so you know it could be policing it could be traffic it could be a lot of stuff that we're talking about our sweet spot is the city is that we're big enough to be internationally relevant but we're small enough to get things done our metro area is about 1.4 million people so what we're interested in is enhancing that citizen experience and bridging that world between the home in the city and have people look at really their home in an expanded sense the city is your home so how do you bring all this data together and let it talk to you either in the home in your car on your device so that you're totally informed about what your options are to enhance your quality of life that could be entertainment it could be safety it could be traffic it could be a variety of things all right mayor Fischer thank you for being with us today