When cities become living labs

How Ubiwhere’s solutions can contribute to building open innovation ecosystems.

Beatriz Barateiro, Product Owner at Ubiwhere, displaying the Smart PAYT at Afurada Living Lab Open Day 2024.

Imagine that one day, the area you live in becomes a laboratory to test innovative solutions. And that you get to be a part of it. You get to be involved in technological innovation, test the products and services under development, and provide feedback to adapt that innovation to your reality.

This is what happened in Afurada. A peculiar area of Vila Nova de Gaia with its very own characteristics. It is a region that grew around a fishing dock, where fishing is one of the main activities of its population, together with tourism, since it is in the area of the Douro, in transition to the beaches.

Together with regional and technological partners, Ubiwhere was involved in the Afurada Living Lab for the past three years to test solutions within this particular scenario and community. The main objective is to promote a low-carbon economy and the sustainable development of the Afurada community.

A Living Lab is an open innovation ecosystem in a real-life environment that uses iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach to innovation to create sustainable impact. The focus relies on co-creation, rapid prototyping, and testing to scale up innovations.

Living labs are designed to address various challenges associated with the development, testing, and implementation of innovative technologies such as:

• User Acceptance and Adoption: Living labs provide a platform for involving end-users throughout the development process, allowing developers to understand user needs, preferences, and behaviours early on. By incorporating user feedback iteratively, living labs increase the likelihood of successful adoption and uptake of new technologies.
• Real-world Validation: Living labs offer a real-world testing environment where technologies can be evaluated in authentic contexts, enabling developers to assess performance, usability, and reliability under realistic conditions.
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Living labs bring together diverse stakeholders, including researchers, businesses, government agencies, and community members, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation of solutions.
• Community Engagement and Equity: Engaging with communities and addressing equity concerns are essential for the successful implementation of innovative technologies. Living labs involve local communities in the innovation process, allowing them to voice their opinions, contribute ideas, and shape the development of solutions that directly impact their lives. This community engagement fosters trust, transparency, and inclusivity, leading to more equitable outcomes.

By addressing these challenges, living labs play a vital role in accelerating the development, testing, and implementation of innovative technologies, ultimately leading to more effective and sustainable solutions for societal problems.

Within Afurada Living Lab, Ubiwhere was able to implement and test different solutions — the Smart PAYT, the Smart Parking and the Smartlamppost.

In the case of Smart PAYT, the main goals were to pioneer the separation of biowaste in Vila Nova de Gaia by raising awareness about the environmental impact of waste production and testing the access control system and its adoption by citizens. The pilot consists of four smart containers to serve around 400 people. The containers are integrated with the management platform that allows monitoring of the containers in real time and contributes to increasing the efficiency of the system, improving the operations management.

The Smart Parking was installed in a parking lot near Lavadouro, one of the most iconic places of Afurada, near the fish market and the fishing dock. The digitalisation of the park is possible due to a CCTV camera and processing unit installed in a lamppost that monitors the occupation of the facilities. This system is integrated with an informative panel that will be placed on the nearby road to inform drivers about availability in the park. Indirectly, this impacts air quality by decreasing the emissions associated with traffic and finding free spots. Additionally, it is integrated with a management portal, allowing decision-makers to monitor the flows of the area.

Finally, two Smartlampposts with different devices are available, not only to provide better lighting but also to provide other services. These accommodate a CCTV camera and processing unit to monitor the flow of people in the area, a wifi distributor to provide access to the community in public space and an air quality and weather station that allows monitoring in real time of temperature and concentration of greenhouse gases.

The data from the three solutions are then aggregated and integrated in the Urban Platform, Ubiwhere’s solution for city management. The platform provides a holistic view of the city and KPIs about the above-mentioned solutions to provide decision-makers with insights about the impact of the solutions.

The project is now reaching its end, even though collaboration with the city has never been concluded, and results could not be more positive due to the collaboration of all stakeholders. The main lesson learned is that if solutions are developed for the citizens and to improve their quality of life, it is crucial to co-create and place citizens in the centre of innovation design. Community engagement and empowerment are crucial to shape the development of solutions and to create the technologies that will actually solve their needs, have a positive impact and are ready to scale-up.