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Last month’s FIRE looked at the Smart City and the John Lewis effect; it explored how the Fire and Rescue Service might fit

into and contribute to this brave new world. Attendees at the recent CFOA Briefing on the Smart City heard from a stellar cast of speakers who pondered the same questions and offered their advice.

The mantra running throughout the day was “what’s the problem you’re trying to solve?” With more than 50 people in the audience at the third in a series of CFOA briefings, there were plenty of keen minds willing to listen, learn and search out those problems.

Paul Egan, the first speaker at the CFOA briefing, provided more detail on the Smart City and the Internet of Things.

“Anything with a current in it” was Paul’s simple explanation. Of those ‘things’, smartphones are the most ubiquitous, but there are many more to be connected to the Internet. Paul offered one estimate from tech giant Cisco that 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.

He went on to say: “There is a lot of hype, but it is real. The Internet of Things will change our world and the things in it.”

World ChangerOne of the examples that Paul talked about was the smart fire extinguisher made by US company, en-Gauge (http://www.engaugeinc.net/). Its inbuilt sensors provide data to building managers about activation, pressure levels and movement; this data then informs the inspection process so that it is efficient in terms of time spent and effective in terms of life safety.

Alex Flahive, Digital Manager at Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS), shared his inspired idea for using the Internet of Things to solve a problem.

Smoke alarms go off. Smoke alarms alert householders. Smoke alarms are a good thing. Smoke alarms are fitted with powerful sensors and can transmit data. The problem is that the data does not go directly to the Fire and Rescue Service. Is this a problem that needs solving?

For Alex, the answer is ‘yes’. The previous article on the Smart City highlighted the assets that the Fire and Rescue Service have to offer the Smart City. One of these assets is the

drill tower. It is high and perfect for installing sensors that can be connected to the Internet and form their own network. In this case, Alex is using LoRaWAN, a low power wide area network which is intended for the operation of wireless battery ‘things’ – so perfect for smoke alarms.

Imagine that the network between the three separate drill towers is three overlapping circles. Then imagine that each smoke alarm installed by GMFRS in homes located within the three circles has been adapted to transmit data to the sensor on the drill tower and that the sensor transmits the data directly to GMFRS. That data would include information about temperature in the home, battery life, pollutants (smoke, heat, CO, air quality) and a history of activation (or not).

If GMFRS has the data from the smoke alarms it installed in homes where its existing analysis determined risk of fire was highest, what more does it tell them? It is another layer of data to add to the existing armoury – another piece of the data puzzle. Analysis of this data will give staff a much more nuanced view of human behaviour in those homes and help GMFRS hone their own interventions.

Humberside Fire and Rescue Service, in a pilot with smoke alarm supplier Sprue Aegis, is trying

Let’s work out the problem firstIn the second part of FIRE’s examination of the Smart City concept, Catherine Levin reports on why the Fire and Rescue Service needs to be at the forefront of this ‘brave new world’

“There is a lot of

hype, but it is real.

The Internet of

Things will change

our world and the

things in it”

FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin

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something similar. It is linking up smoke alarms through the Internet directly to fire and rescue services, primarily focused on temperature in the home as part of an attempt to reduce excess winter deaths.

Fire Service InnovationAre these solutions answers to the problems that lead to a Smart City? Is it the role of the Fire and Rescue Service to innovate in this way? Can it proactively gather more data than it does already, use it to refine its own services and offer it up to the rest of the public service and to citizens?

There is a fine line between a benevolent state looking after the most vulnerable and the right to privacy. Not everyone would agree to allow data about their own behaviour be transmitted in this way and data sharing agreements would need to very carefully thought through.

The first stage of the journey is historic data and this often sits in PDFs – ‘the place where data goes to die’. By this he means that it is incredibly difficult to access data in a PDF and yet the majority of public data, whether it is in committee minutes for local government meetings or reports from central government, is held in this format and cannot be easily analysed.

Another barrier with historic data is the variety of structures, data labels and incompatible technologies that all conspire against the citizen ever being able to make sense of it. For Eddie, every part of the public sector has a part of the data puzzle, but no one is putting it together and while this exists, the Smart City is harder to realise.

On the data journey, Eddie talked about ‘unleashing data from its silos’ by getting organisations to share it with a view to citizens saying ‘here’s our problem, who can help us solve it?’ He urged, “Please don’t ignore the huge value of the data you are already sitting on.”

There are plenty of issues around this data marketplace idea, not least the privacy issues, security and historic data issues described above. However, it is a good start to developing the Smart City and already much of fire and rescue data is out there, at an individual organisation level, and in open data portals – London, Glasgow and Manchester are just a few examples.

Data PowerSometimes problems are unknown, as this data example from Ben Wellington demonstrates. The open data guru Ben Wellington got a mention in the previous FIRE article. Since then, he has published a new study based on his own problem: being ticketed for parking violations where the violation was removed from the parking rules years ago. He knew that the rule change had been passed by the NYC government but it seemed parking wardens had

no idea. Using the dataset provided on the NYC Open

Data portal, he looked at the extent of the problem across the five boroughs of New York City and found that hundreds of thousands of dollars of parking tickets were being issued (over the 2.5 years of data he had access to) with one space alone earning $48,000.

Ben writes: “I’ve repeatedly said that putting data into the hand of citizens will make our city run better and more equitably”. He showed this in the example from the last issue of FIRE and reinforces it with his most recent analysis.

Having looked at Ben’s analysis of city parking data, the NYPD wrote back to him to say that they agreed. As a result they would be focusing training on those areas where the problems were highest. ‘Thanks to this analysis and the availability of this open data’, wrote the NYPD, ‘the department is also taking steps to digitally monitor these types of summonses to ensure that they are being issued correctly’.

This is citizen-led change using open data. This example demonstrates the power of data

to help change the lives of citizens and that is at the heart of the Smart City – where policy change leads to improved outcomes for citizens.

This is all very well. The utopia of all the public data available to all the citizens but what are they supposed to do with it? Not everyone is a data whizz like Ben Wellington or like the many data analysts working away in each fire and rescue service across the UK.

Data about policing and crime is freely available via data.police.uk and provides a simple, user-friendly interface to look at crime in neighbourhoods down to street level. Amanda Smith from the Open Data Institute previously worked at the Home Office on data.police.uk and came to the briefing with a challenge: tell the Fire and Rescue Service how to get to data.fire.uk.

She too talked about journeys. For her it was the journey of a crime. The challenge of aligning data from police IT systems with that held in the court IT systems is preventing this ambition from being realised. But her point was well made: what would the journey of a fire look like?

Is it enough to provide data on individual

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incidents to the Home Office, now owners of the incident recording system? What about all the data underpinning the prevention activity? It cannot just be about the number of home fire safety visits any more, but should contain the rich data from all the partnership activity, the complexity of a safe and well visit. Perhaps add in LIFEBID data, the experience of citizens who suffer house fires, that is another stage in the journey of a fire.

The journey to data.fire.uk is likely to be a long one. Amanda visited every police service in England and Wales to discover how each one managed its data so that a single approach to collecting, collating and analysing could be developed. In turn, the Home Office created a tool that citizens can easily use to discover information about crime in their neighbourhood.

FRS Data Shake UpIs that what the Fire and Rescue Service will have to do? Is it time for a huge shake up of the data that is submitted to IRS not just about opening it up? Maybe. But would releasing all this data be of use to citizens? What difference would it make? There are so many questions here and they need to be thought through.

By the time this article is published, the Home Secretary will have made an announcement about the future of the Fire and Rescue Service (see pg 9). Trailed as being underpinned by six

pillars of reform, it is gratifying to see that one of those pillars is data and transparency. If that leads to providing open access to IRS, then that is a result but it will not be enough.

Paul Egan started the briefing by saying “the business context in which we operate is changing rapidly. The opportunity for individuals to generate and consume data is set to explode. The acquisition and consumption of data will become as important as energy”.

The speakers at this event were set a challenge to inspire the Fire and Rescue Service to think about their role in the Smart City. They met this challenge and provided background, examples and advice on what that role might be. For now it is heavily focused on data, but that is just the start.

“Ultimately,” says Paul Egan, “the Internet of Things will deliver benefits to us all.” Taking inspiration from this event, the Fire and Rescue Service needs to work out what are the problems that the Internet of Things can help to solve. The benefits should be seen in improved service delivery that is more effective and more efficient; the development of strong evidence bases that inform improved public policy approaches concerned with public safety.

Let us be at the forefront of this new world. Leadership could come from CFOA, but it can also come from a collective desire to get this right and the inspiration from this event is a great place to start.

“Taking inspiration

from this event, the

Fire and Rescue

Service needs to

work out what are

the problems that

the Internet of Things

can help to solve”

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