Multifunctional Interactive Furniture for Smart Cities

Abstract

The adaptation of cities to a future in which connectivity is at the service of the citizens will be a reality by creating interaction spaces and augmented urban areas. The research on this field falls within the scope of Smart Cities (SC) with the advantages that the common public spaces provide as new points for information exchange between the city, the urban furniture and their citizens. Kiosk systems have been recognized as an appropriate mean for providing event-aware and localized information to the right audience at the right time. Hence, in this article, we provide a vision of an eco-system of multifunctional urban furniture, where kiosks are part of them, designed not only for digital interaction but for sustainable use and symbolic integration into the urban environment as well. The proposed approach is conceived to drive services through digital urban nodes that facilitate tailored citizen-city communication and interaction. The central element of the designed platform consists on an intelligent digital kiosk which features a series of hardware and software components for sensing different environmental conditions, multimodal interaction with users and for conveying the captured data to the Cloud. The custom-based contents visualized to the users are controlled remotely through a management tool that allows to set-up and configure the digital kiosk. This system is not presented as an ad-hoc solution for one specific purpose but instead, it becomes a platform that can accommodate and solve the needs of every kind of user that populates urban shared-use spaces.