Designing Smart Cities for Citizen Health & Well-being
Inas S. Khayal, Amro M. Farid · 2017
-Smart cities initiatives invariably include a quest to improve health in the process of making cities "smarter". The quest for health improvement is typically passively assumed rather than actively undertaken. This leads to the question of how to design smart cities to take into account citizen health and well-being. We first describe the health factors associated with health outcomes. In doing so, we emphasize the importance of analyzing not only biological factors but the critical social and physical environments where people live work and play – thus highlighting the opportunity for smart cities to impact health. Given that health factors are not expected to have a 1to-1 mapping with social and physical environments, this paper develops the mapping of health factors to social and physical environments. This is accomplished by first describing the health factors impacting health outcomes. Next, health is modeled as state described by discrete event dynamics using Petri-nets. This health model incorporates health factors associated with social and physical environments. Finally, frameworks describing social and physical environments are introduced to develop the mapping of health factors to the social and physical environments. If smart cities are to truly address health, we need to understand where new technology or networked systems affect health factors. The mapping presented in this work explicitly describes the social and physical environments that impact health factors. Such work allows practitioners to account for ways that smart cities initiatives can actively impact health rather than passively hoping to do so.