CANTON OHIO: It’s home to the Football Hall of Fame, Kent State University, and now Wi-Fiber’s Smart City and Real Time Crime Center, powered by BlueforceEDGE, for distributed gunshot intelligence and more. Wi-Fiber manufactures a best-in-class Smart City Platform which leverages BlueforceEDGE to fuse a wide array of pluggable and dynamically adaptable sensors in the lamp head which include: Lighting control, two-way microphones, speakers, 4K cameras with cognitive AI services, and a distributed gunshot detection capability, all with IoT, 2/5G Wi-Fi, and LTE connectivity. This advanced smart city platform is built on open standards and is modular by design, allowing system operators to snap in new components without replacing the entire unit.
A “smart city†provides intelligent capabilities which improves the quality of life for its citizens by leveraging technology to respond, in real-time, to a highly dynamic environment. Cities are discovering that the infrastructure being built to enhance efficiencies can also be used to safeguard citizens. In many ways, the smart city movement is providing the infrastructure necessary to enhance public safety.
Last year, Canton began researching alternatives to ShotSpotter, a centralized gunshot detection system that has become increasingly expensive. Canton turned to Wi-Fiber which provides a modular, system-of-systems approach to allow for rapid adaptation of lamp heads where services may be deployed and redeployed quickly. After careful analysis, Canton police indicated that the combined Wi-Fiber/Blueforce solution would cost less over time and be more versatile than ShotSpotter, providing 3x-4x the capabilities and also cover more of the city. “The more and more we dug into it, we saw it was going to probably be more of a cost-effective solution,” Canton Police Chief Jack Angelo said. “Plus, we could increase it in the city.” The combined solution would also provide distributed delivery of incident information leveraging Blueforce’s mobile edge IoT software products to truly enable hyper-local notification to the police mobile device and MDT.
Furthermore, Wi-Fiber’s comprehensive wireless mesh canopy is distributed throughout the district serving as a community asset and test site for a host of applications, other smart city sensor assets, and for providing greater coverage area, with significantly even more outcomes for ~30% less investment.
The Wi-Fiber Smart City Platform provides a wide array of capabilities, all fused by BlueforceEDGE and then made securely sharable with people, sensors, and AI stream analytics and include:
- Lamp control: Programmatic or manual controls
- Air quality sensing: Modular sensing of proximate air
- Gunshot detection: Distributed detection & notification
- Temperature: Real-time air and lamp temperature
- Static and full motion video: Live access from HQ or mobile
- AI to the Edge: Programmatic access to 12+ AI algorithms
- FirstNet and 5G mobile edge compute services: Runs Blueforce MEC services on the lamp head
- Hyper local access and sense-making of nodes on the local Wi- Fiber mesh
The Canton solution, and corresponding wireless network, sets new standards for urban connectivity and was also specifically designed to replace a Shotspotter solution, inclusive of greater shot intelligence from pressure, acoustic & vibration analytics and video correlation, resulting in a superior and highly accurate solution. Download the datasheet o learn more about Wi-Fiber and Blueforce solution.