Smart Campus: Fostering the Community Awareness Through an Intelligent Environment

Interconnected computational devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) context make possible to collect real-time data about a specific environment. The IoT paradigm can be exploited together with data visualization techniques to put into effect intelligent environments, where pervasive technologies enable people to experience and interact with the generated data. In this paper, we present a case study where these emerging areas and related technologies have been explored to benefit communities, making their members actively involved as central players of such an intelligent environment. To give practical effect to our approach, we designed and developed a system, named Smart Campus, composed of: i) an infrastructure made of sensors to collect real-time data in a University Campus, and ii) a rich web-based application to interact with spatio-temporal data, available in a public interactive touch monitor. To validate the system and grasp insights, we involved 135 students through a survey, and we extracted meaningful data from the interactive sessions with the public display. Results show that this Campus community understood the potential of the system and students are willing to actively contribute to it, pushing us to better investigate future scenarios where students can participate with ideas, visualizations/services to integrate into the web-based system, as well as sensors to plug into the infrastructure.