Smart city monitoring functions typically take a lot of expensive hardware and are limited to the areas where that hardware is set up, but SenSen is changing the game with a new smartphone app called GeminEye that has the goal of allowing those functions to happen anywhere a city employee, or even a dutiful citizen, has a smartphone handy. The app is currently available for registration on SenSen’s website, with an unspecified official launch date.
The app is going to be a bit threadbare on features when it first launches. Right now, it’s capable of performing illegal dumping monitoring in real time, and carrying out common parking enforcement tasks. These two things are important for any bustling smart city, of course, but more features are on the way in the near future. According to SenSen’s site, the company is planning to add in parking guidance for busy streets, asset mapping and management to keep track of city funds and projects, warehouse stock tracking, time-lapse imaging, and even monitoring of human activity within public spaces.
GeminEye uses AI technology to learn and grow as it monitors a given smart city. The built-in functions start out with an understanding level that’s based on the training data available from each feature’s in-factory training and time in the field. Since these are the same features that have been available for a while on SenSen’s full-fat hardware and software stacks, you can expect mostly similar performance, save for any hiccups that may be introduced by the cloud services stack running behind the app, the smartphone running the app, and of course any potential issues within the app itself.
That’s not to say that GeminEye won’t launch already full-featured and reliable. SenSen has been in the smart city hardware and software business for quite some time, and has been around since 2006. SenSen’s powerful software and years of experience ensure that GeminEye users will be enjoying a similar feature set and level of quality to the larger implementations of the app’s functions as they roll out.
As mentioned above, SenSen Networks has been in the smart city business for a long time. That should help to quash any alarm bells raised by GeminEye’s planned people monitoring capabilities. That function has been hard at work through SenSen’s hardware, and though there is obviously potential for misuse, its implementation has yet to produce any major privacy crises as yet. What this means is that the data it collects is not used for the same kind of mass surveillance going on in China, for example.
The impact that will be made is the spread of smart city technologies. Not only will existing smart cities be able to take advantage of wider availability of the features they already use on a daily basis, but this development may well open the door to non-smart cities using some of those features on a limited basis, and perhaps even transitioning over time. City employees and others could use GeminEye, or contracted technologies derived from it, to help monitor their own communities in a centralized fashion, potentially cutting down labor and deployment costs.