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Table 4 Benefits of Big Data in Smart City Components

From: Applications of big data to smart cities

Smart City Components

Benefits of Big Data in Smart City Components

Smart Healthcare

• Allow healthcare providers and practitioners to gather, analyze, and utilize patient information, which can also be used by insurance companies and some government agencies.

• Support processing complex occurrences to monitor, analyze, and flag potential health issues either on a daily basis or on a demand basis.

• Increase the amount and real-time nature of data gathered for certain patients’ healthissues through smart devices, which are connected to the home or hospital to monitor attributes like blood pressure, blood sugar, and sleep patterns for accurate and timely responses to health issues and for a comprehensive patient history records.

Smart Energy

• Facilitate decision-making related to the supply levels of electricity in line with actual demand of the citizens and over all affecting conditions.

• Allow forecasting in a near-real time manner through efficient analysis of the big data collected.

• Align with strategic objectives (resource optimization) through specific pricing plans consistent with supplies, demand, and production models.

Smart Transportation

• Recognize traffic patterns by investigating real time data

• Reduce main city roads’ congestion by predicting traffic conditions and adjusting traffic controls. Through big data, the smart city will be able to reduce traffic and accidents by opening new roads, enhancing the infrastructure based on congestion data, and collecting information on car parking and alternative roads.

• Reduce supply chain waste by associating deliveries and optimizing shipping movements.

• Enable data streaming to process and communicate traffic information collected through sensors, smart traffic lights and on-vehicle devices to drivers via smartphones or other communication devices.

• Big data can be used to send feedback for specific entities to take action to alleviate or resolve a traffic problem.

Smart Environment

• Provide weather information that will lead to improving the country’s agriculture, better informing people of possible hazardous conditions, and better management of energy utilization by providing more accurate predictions on demand.

Smart Safety

• Provide detailed and spatial and temporal geographic area maps and help to easily determine whatever changes may happen.

• Help predict future environmental changes or natural disasters like earthquake detection that will give an opportunity to save lives and resources.

Smart Education

• Optimize academic research; for instance, astronomer can now analyze a huge astronomy dataset using powerful computers instead of manual analyses. By analyzing and exploring high quality digital images taken from space, new discoveries may happen in the fields. This is applicable to many science and research fields such as medical experiments, manufacturing operations, environmental studies, and economic and financial analysis.

• Behavior and matchmaking will lead to new knowledge. From assessment of graduates to online attitudes, each student generates a unique data track. By analyzing these data, education institutes can realize whether they are using their resources in the right places and producing the right results.

Smart Governance

• Support the integration and collaboration of different government agencies and combine or streamline their processes. This will result in more efficient operations, better handling of shared data, and stronger regulation management and enforcement.

• Improve business decisions through big data analytics support. By researching a firm’s behavior and economic growth in addition to its rivals and environment conditions, more appropriate and effective decisions related to employment, production, and location strategies can be made.

• Publish new policies for the benefit of data owners (citizens) and producers (government agencies). Government agencies will help develop the quality of the data, while citizens will show how they can use the data and transfer it to new knowledge to enhance the quality of government services.

• Help governments focus on the citizens’ concerns related to health and social care, housing, education, policing, and other issues.