Louisville, KY brings the smart city into the smart home

Dive Brief:

The city of Louisville, KY, is working with local developer groups to connect web-enabled home devices with city information systems, according to CNET, which has a two-bedroom apartment in the city where it tests smart-home products and systems.
Among the smart features available to residents are a daily update from the Mayor’s Office via devices like Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant platform and a responsive network of Philips Hue lamps whose color changes to reflect local air quality.
Developers are working with the city to utilize IFTTT (If This Then That), a program through which users can create conditional actions among their apps and devices. The city also installed wireless smoke detectors in vacant and abandoned buildings.

Dive Insight:

Smart technology is finding its way into homes, often before buyers get involved.

In December, Brookfield Residential’s Washington, DC, division announced a line of smart homes in Northern Virginia featuring voice-enabled home automation through Amazon Alexa. That followed KB Home’s unveiling of a suite of home automation features controllable through Apple’s HomeKit platform in two new communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A recent renter survey from Wakefield Research and Schlage found that a larger share of millennials than baby boomers will pay more for a property kitted out with automated or remote-controlled devices.

Like Louisville, more cities are looking to take advantage of smart technology and more projects are expected to be unveiled this year.

Columbus, OH, was recently named the winner of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, garnering $140 million in public and private funding toward projects aimed at improving transportation in the region, including data-capture sensors along roadways and driverless vehicles, TechRepublic reported.

In Florida, Miami–Dade County recently rolled out an AT&T Smart Cities Operations Center pilot project, which includes features through which government officials can assess traffic and other conditions in the area as well as upgrading streetlighting to LED.

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