Smarter Cities may boost efficiency but can it solve real issues? Photo: Michigan Municipal League (Flickr)

This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor

Running a city? Yeah, there’s an app for that.

Smart growth seems to have taken an evolutionary step in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. IBM has brought their Smart Cities concept to the former Brazilian capital; a model that uses information and communication technology to improve economic efficiency, thus enabling further development.

Services are carried out via the IBM Intelligent Operations Center. Think of it as a mission control for cities, white lab coats included. They are able to leverage real-time city information, anticipate problems, and coordinate available resources.

The system was originally integrated in Rio as a way to improve the city’s emergency response system following the 2010 floods. By using a forecasting system that synthesizes data from the river basin, topography surveys, historical rainfall logs and radar feeds, the Operations Center is able to anticipate heavy rains, flash floods, landslides, power outages, and traffic hazards.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. IBM kicked things up a notch by fully integrating 30 city agencies into a single operations center, constantly tracking the pulse of city operations. By breaking down inter-organizational silos, they speed response and recovery time.

Residents can simply download an app to their smart phone or track city alerts via Facebook and Twitter. Car accident or traffic jam? Simply pull up the app and it will calculate the most efficient route based on current and predicted traffic patterns. City workers, meanwhile, can monitor emergency responses to the same event.

This prompts the questions: why has this taken so long, and where else could it work?

Perhaps IBM's expertise made the difference in Rio. The computing giant is just one player in the expanding smart systems market, but the Operations Center (the only one of its kind) is their unique advantage. The logic is that if the Smart City model can work in a large city like Rio, especially during Carnaval, it can be applied anywhere. IBM has reported that they are already productizing the model and are able to scale it to small and medium-sized cities.

At the behest of IBM, Rio even installed a chief operating officer to oversee the Operations Center, allowing it to run autonomously.

Can you run a city like a business? Should you? Some residents of Rio are asking. Many are also concerned that smart technologies serve affluent neighborhoods better than Rio’s favelas, or slums.

With a price tag of $14 million for the IBM project, perhaps we should question whether cities should first invest in addressing basic infrastructure and economic disparities before installing a new operating system.

You can check out a demo of IBM’s Operation Center here.

Cell phone technology has changed the economic landscape in many parts of the world. Now it might shape health care as well. Photo: Lisa Hoashi/Mercy Corps

Diagnosing diseases, running blood work and monitoring brain activity -- yup, there will be an app for that. And unlike Angry Birds, it might save lives.

One such project uses a polarized laser in a phone’s camera to find traces of malaria in the blood. Another stops the parasite before it even reaches the host: the program uses sound waves at resonant frequencies that cause nearby mosquitoes to vibrate uncontrollably and temporarily lose the ability to fly.

These projects prove that phones that simply send and receive calls are a thing of the past, and no one understands this better than Bill Gates. Under Gates’ program Grand Challenges in Global Health, applications that improve health are on the fast track from concept to reality. While these apps could be used anywhere, they would focus primarily on areas where medical tools or trained personnel are unavailable. Most of the programs are years away from completion, Fast Company Magazine reports, but the health benefits and cost savings they would bring could be worth the wait.

Another project funded by Grand Challenges would create an inexpensive near-infrared camera attachment that could monitor the brain activity of infants who have experienced a head injury. This application would then alert users of any dangerous brain swelling. Also in development is an app that would allow smartphones to scan medical documents into central databases.

But the Gates Foundation is not the only organization supporting smartphone developments for the global good. The X Prize Foundation has created a prize incentive for the development of a 2G phone-network-based education system. This would allow anyone with access to a cell phone to listen to educational lessons and lectures and interact through text messages.

These applications are still a ways off. Even if they are completed, they may never be an appropriate technology for the developing world. Physical location, parts availability, infrastructure, and even culture can stop a new technology from being adopted. Currently, smartphones are inaccessible to many parts of the world, particularly those targeted by the X Prize and Gates Foundation. But only a few years ago, the same could be said about mobile phones. Now, an estimated 4.6 billion subscriptions exist worldwide.

While it might be hard to imagine smartphones functioning in places where most housing is still made from mud, even these challenges are being addressed; Gates is funding a project that uses the metabolic outputs of microorganisms in soil to charge cell phones. Welcome to the future.