Big developments for the IOTA community as Taipei, the capital city of the east Asian nation Taiwan, is set to incorporate IOTA’s Tangle in an effort to achieve it's 'Smart City Living Lab' through a variety of different projects currently underway. By utilizing the blockless distributed ledger technology, Taipei City hopes it can reach their goal of becoming a technological adapt environment where numerous real world challenges are solved using the intelligent implementation of up and coming technology.
Wei-bin Lee, Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology in the Taipei City Government, gave a few details in a press release:
“With Taipei City always thinking ahead and with IOTA’s technology, this partnership is a strategic move to usher in the era of smart cities to the citizens of Taipei,”
The first project is the issuance of tamper proof digital citizen cards that possess a built-in TangleID that will provide citizens with protections against identity theft or fraud in numerous environments from voting to providing background medical record information, or when using any number of government-related services. Other uses cases that are being investigated include inter-organisation and inter-city data exchanges.
Another project in development is Airbox, a palm-sized air sensor with the ability to read environmental variables like temperature, humidity, light, and pollution. This is a joint effort being undertaken by Edimax, Realtek, Asus, and Academia Sinica, LASS and Taipei City. The plan is to install these sensors in numerous locations including citizens homes and at 150 elementary schools. With the help of BiiLabs, a startup working in close coordination with the IOTA Foundation, the sensors will collect and share air quality data which in turn can be sold using IOTA, thus making it one of the most detailed environmental sensor networks in the world.
Exciting times indeed face the residents of Taipei City. With the implementation of this and many more projects sure to be launch in the future, the combination of innovative ideas with distributed ledger technology may lead Taipei to becoming one of the most advanced cities on the globe.