As of November 2019, more than half the world’s population were living in cities, presenting an escalating problem of managing orderly, effective and efficient service management – including public safety and security, social services and urban management such as cleaning and infrastructure maintenance.
Enter Solution House Software, a market leader in urban management and public safety, with its Smart Cities software offering – now including integrated facial recognition.
Population pressure
With the mass population migration, it is easy to see why integrated service management is becoming more than an idle experiment with smart city ‘futurism’.
Tiaan Janse van Rensburg, Solution House Software Director, says COVID-19 has further complicated the issue, with knock-on effects felt by cities around the world.
“As cities, and smart cities in particular, play an ever more important role, additional pressures are being placed on them by rampant infections causing lockdown of the population and a decrease in economic activity – including the increased pressure to reduce levies, rates and taxes.”
Janse van Rensburg says this impact on rates, taxes and revenue in general is forcing smart cities to seek better efficiencies across multiple systems of service management and to make better use of technology.
“What’s needed is more effective and efficient service delivery and management – essentially, doing more with less.”
Integrated incident management
Janse van Rensburg says the Smart Cities concept ties in well with Incident Desk, a global service request, routing and management engine used for urban management, maintenance and public safety.
The platform is used by over 40 urban areas and Central Improvement Districts in South Africa, including the Cape Town city centre, Century City, Umhlanga, Maboneng, New Town and the Johannesburg city centre.
“It provides a completely integrated real-time environment, tying often disparate systems from multiple vendors and service providers together in an integrated, holistic solution, providing a consolidated ‘big picture’ view.”
“Incident Desk not only connects many buildings, facilities and areas in one solution, but also interlinks the teams responding to the service requests – public safety officers, security officers, social services, municipal managers and maintenance crews – and provides them with accurate, up-to-date information backed up by an efficient end-to-end management solution.”
Solving complex management and privacy concerns
Whereas Incident Desk is used widely across security, facility management, retail, education and service management environments, the focus in Smart Cities is the provision of urban management, public safety and social services in cities, councils, districts, commercial and residential estates, Janse van Rensburg says.
Crucially, it complies with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) in its use of facial recognition (FR) software to identify and register workers, clients and persons of interest.
“Solution House’s Desktop and Mobile Facial Recognition solution provides a complex POPIA-compliant system for the protection and safeguarding of personal files and information,” says Janse van Rensburg. “In addition, it offers real-time facial recognition check and verification against a private watch list database.”
Overlaying live incident heat maps, the Smart City solution enables control rooms or security services to track and dispatch mobile workers, emergency response teams or guards to incident or service locations – easily and in real-time.
Smart future
Janse van Rensburg says Solution House’s future plans include expanding the FR capability of Smart Cities to private property CCTV.
This will allow the integration of numerous participating customers’ devices into one real-time, centralised, POPIA-compliant environment, combining mobile, desktop and peripheral devices into one coherent solution.
“To preserve public safety and security in increasingly crowded smart cities around the world, smart, integrative incident and service management is essential,” Janse van Rensburg says. “A responsive city is a smart, safe and healthy city.”
For more information, please visit https://www.myincidentdesk.com/smart-cities or e-mail info@myincidentdesk.com.
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Incident Desk
Incident Desk is owned, managed and supported by Solution House Software. Its software framework, offering rapid development and deployment of geo-located service request solutions and associated smart phone apps, provides solutions for unlimited service requests across multiple installations, mobile device integration and application deployment, dashboard and trending statistical analysis for several global multi-tenanted clients.
Developed for the modern, multi-faceted management company, and catering for various industries, the framework is built on open source components and delivered via the cloud. Incubated, designed, crafted and refined in Cape Town over the last ten years, the Incident Desk solution enjoys full support from a team located in Cape Town and London.