Smart City Tree Management

What is it?

Smart city tree management has 7 different sensors (4 at hackathon due to limitation of hardware) that are able to detect tree's health condition and its surrounding environment in urban area, which would eventually help trees to sustain the healthy air quality and beauty of the city ecology. Trees greatly reduce both air pollution and sound pollution, we help to monitor tree's health as well as help to reduce water on maintaining them.

Argument Reality (AR)

Users can also using Argument Reality to view the current sensor data of the tree via IBM, giving tree a different type of interaction.

Why are we building it?

With rapidly changing climate, landscape, and city infrastructure due to human activities, effective management of plants is required more than ever. We believe that by smartly managing tree, which is one of the most environmently friendly elements that improves the air quality and ecology system of urban areas, smart city tree management will bring these following benefits to the society we live in.

How does it work? (Arduino 101)

We use 7 different sensors (only 4 at CES Readwrite hackathon) connected to Arduino 101, Seeed Grove Shield and Intel IoT Gateway. These includes sound sensor to detect sound pollution, piezo vibration sensor to detect if tree has been moving a lot, or sudden movement means there are impacts, light sensor to detect if the tree is receiving enough sunlight, and temperature sensor to ensure that it does not freeze, or we'd need to water it more often. We used airquality sensor to detect air quality around the tree, moisture sensor to detect the soil moisture level, and carbon sensor to ensure that the tree is intaking carbon dioxide, ensuring tree's health.

Intel IoT Gateway and IBM Watson IoT Platform

Intel Curie and Intel IoT Gateway then transfer the data into IBM Watson IoT Platform for display and analysis. Additionally, we've integrated slack on IBM Conversation API for the city workers to monitor and collaborate.

UL

We've are using trees to try to reduce air pollution as well as sound pollution which protects the overall health of the population, on top of everything we are monitoring the trees when they are about to fall through movement sensor, to avoid hazard accidents where it might hit a car or injure a person.

Alexa

Alexa can be easily used to ask questions about the current state about the health of the trees, as well as where the sound and air pollutions come from.

Honeywell

Honeywell helps to regulate room temperatures from the temperature of the trees outside. When trees are getting cold, the room will automatically turn it's heater on. When there are a lot of pollution outside, honeywell would also turn AC on to ensure a cleaner room

Other tools

Additionally, we've built a map tool for the city to see which specific tree is having problems, either movement, or not taking enough carbon dioxide so that people can focus on fixing the problem for the tree that's sick. It would also give us a greater understanding of the trees for the future.