The city of Salerno has become the third town in Italy to join forces with IBM with the aim of creating a Smart City.

Under its new agreement with IBM, Salerno will create an Innovation Board to identify and design a new model for a sustainable city through a range of digital technologies. The cities of Parma and Reggio Emilia announced similar initiatives with IBM last month.

Salerno is a modern city in southern Italy. As part of the Smart City effort, city managers plan to launch citizen-focused innovations to provide new “intelligence” for existing infrastructure. The goal is to optimise resources, improve services to citizens and businesses, and make city operations smarter and more efficient.

Salerno’s Town Council has identified four strategic goals as part of its Smart City plan:

• Overcoming architectural barriers to create a special route for the blind from a dedicated parking area to the Verdi Theatre. Smart sensors will be placed in the planking and will interact with smart canes, providing information and prompts on mobile phones, enabling the visually impaired to navigate around potential obstacles.
• Using two-dimensional tags to highlight the city’s cultural and artistic heritage. A smart tourist route will be created within the famous citizen park in the old town of Salerno, providing visitors with information through their mobile phones as they explore the area.
• Providing distance health monitoring — a programme named “I am well” — of the elderly through a simple electronic device that will advise them on the right time to take medication, monitor their blood pressure, and provide doctors and family members with an online updated status report.
• Create an urban traffic monitoring and control system using technological components already available in traffic lights, limited-access streets and surveillance cameras. The aim of the project is to manage and share information regarding traffic flow, the availability of parking spaces and parking tariffs in the city centre.

“Salerno is proud to be at the forefront of an intelligent project of this kind,” said Mayor Vincenzo De Luca. “This demonstrates Salerno’s excellence in serving the community and our vision for the future.”

Elsewhere, IBM is working with many other authorities on smarter systems. The cities of Singapore, Brisbane and Stockholm are all working to reduce both congestion and pollution through intelligent transport technologies.

“It is vital for the future that we transform our cities into accessible, dynamic, thriving communities,” said Luciano Martucci, general manager for IBM Italy. “In cities like Salerno, technology can make the local systems and infrastructure smarter and create benefits directly related toward improving the quality of life for all its citizens, in a cost-effective way.”

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