Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Talk to me. Information, news and entertainment on demand. [on-hold music] WUS radio.com. 0:11 [upbeat music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT in our connected world, with your host, Peggy Smedley. [upbeat music] Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:26 My next guest has led extensive work in urban design, housing, and community development projects. 0:32 He is currently continuing his research on smart cities with the development of healthy homes and is the founding principal of the Institut Design. 0:41 Please welcome Joe Calistra, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Kansas. Joe, welcome to the show. Hi, Peggy. Thanks for having me. 0:53 All right, Joe, we have to talk about smart cities, but why are you looking at all this housing? 0:59 And we've talked about this a little bit, but I'm kinda curious, what's going on in all the smart cities, smart housing, smart homes? What's the big-- What's all the big excitement? Sure, thanks. 1:10 Well, we're near Kansas City, and Kansas City in twenty-twelve was the second city to come online with Google Fiber and a gigabit network. 1:19 And so one of the things that we've been looking at is what would you do if you had unlimited bandwidth? And we've kind of seen big data as a new natural resource. 1:28 And, and I think it's gonna be as impactful on the way we plan cities as water and electricity were a hundred years ago. So we've been looking at what big data could mean for the built environment. 1:39 So when we talk about the built environment, so somebody who's listening right now, and they're trying to understand because, you know, we have a broader audience than just construction, you know, many verticals. 1:50 What does that really mean when you talk about the built environment collecting data for that environment? Sure. 1:56 Well, I think mostly what people have been talking about are autonomous cars and, and autonomous driving and the way that cars would communicate with each other. 2:05 But when we talk about the built environment, we mean everything from the sidewalk and how walkable a neighborhood is, to how buildings use energy and communicate with the power grid, to how people walk in their bedrooms and bathrooms. 2:20 And, and what's interesting about that is because that's something we've been saying with our sister publication. 2:25 Now, I've been trying to tell everybody that at Connected World is you can't build anything unless you connect everything, right? I mean- Right. -'cause that's what the IoT is all about. 2:33 So help us understand from a, a population standpoint, because it's everything. It's how the walls, it's how the floors, it's everything is connected. 2:44 I mean, that's what you're really saying here because you can't sense anything, you can't feel anything 'cause everything has to be connected, right? I mean, that's what you're essentially saying. That's right. 2:55 The, the real exciting thing for us as architects is thinking about how a human would work through a space or walk through a space. 3:01 So some of the sensors that we're looking at collect not only environmental data on how the building is performing, but also vital, uh, statistics on how a person's health is acting. 3:13 So biometric data that collects activity tracking, whether has-- someone has fallen, uh, lighting that can help with circadian rhythms, sleep sensors that tell us how you've slept, smart mirrors and smart toilets also. 3:25 And so collecting all this data allows health providers to not only provide healthcare more efficiently and affordably, but maybe even a-at a way that we can predict what someone's going to need next. 3:40 So really the expression, the walls have ears, really means something now, right? Joe, you're just kinda creeping us all out 'cause we're going, you know, we're all worried about Big Brother. 3:48 Well, now we really gotta worry about the walls listening to us. Right. Right. 3:53 Well, the s- the sensors-- the idea is that the sensors, by being embedded in the floors to pick up gait or in the walls to pick up, uh, falls and, and in the ceiling, you know, that having those sensors in the background of your life, um, I think speaks to equity. 4:09 Right now, a lot of the population health strategies are being deployed through smart watches and Fitbits. 4:15 And for the population that we're looking at, you know, zero to fifty percent of area median income in affordable housing, subsidized public housing, mostly seniors, people with ailments, people that wanna have, um, uh, wanna be monitored, people that, uh, you want-- you know, your children wanna check on you. 4:34 These are the people that are not gonna log into an app on their iPhone or their iWatch and, um, and record that data. And so this, this provides sort of a more passive way for us to take care of people. 4:46 I don't know that it only has to be seniors. When I fell and separated my shoulder, I wish somebody was really listening at that moment. So, you know, it can be anybody, right? 4:54 So I mean, what we're really talking about here, though, is, I mean, we have an aging population, but I mean, the idea could be anything, right? 5:01 I mean, you know, that old expression when you've fallen, I'm not gonna infringe on anybody's trademark right now, but, you know, y-you've fallen and you're hurt, and you want somebody to hear you, it can be at any time, right? 5:11 I mean, that's what we're really saying, is that you want that idea and that quick response. But I mean, we do have an aging, aging population, and more of us are getting older. 5:20 As I tell everybody, we're aging every minute at every moment of every day. But the idea is you want that idea so that things are happening in your homes. But it's the same thing like on our streets. 5:30 I mean, we want it, somebody falls on a street. You know, you w- you hope somebody's noticing and something happens. But the concept here, though, is h-how do you fund something like this? 5:39 I mean, we always want research to be funded. How are you guys getting efforts like this? 'Cause are we talking about something that's way out there? Is it something that's gonna happen in our homes soon? 5:49 I mean, how does that all happen? Well, it-- that's absolutely right what you said earlier about population. I mean, trying to, uh, adjust population health would collect data on everyone. 5:59 And, and obviously, probably those that would be helped the most would be the impoverished and the sickUh, those that have fallen or have ailments. So it really is applying this everywhere. 6:10 The problem, as you mentioned, is that it, it probably does cost more to put sensors and this kind of technology in buildings. So we're looking at a number of ways that this cost can be mitigated. 6:20 One, one is, is prefabrication. Obviously, prefabrication lends itself to this kind of technology because you can put these sensors and different infrastructure into the building before it actually gets to the site. 6:32 So prefabricated assemblies and components, we think can bring the cost down. But there's also some things in policy that we're looking at. 6:39 So the, uh, American Affordable Care Act, which is probably going to be rewritten in these coming days, has a chronic care management voucher in it right now. And we'll see how that pans out over the next few months. 6:51 But basically, that would pay for a prescription for a primary healthcare physician to prescribe some kind of monitoring system in the home. 7:00 Now, whether that's gait analysis or a smart toilet that measures your hydration or sleep sensors that can tell you you're not getting a good sleep, uh, that could have huge impacts for how we fund this. 7:11 The other thing is that anything that's prefabricated would not apply for Davis-Bacon wages. And so any subsidized housing project could bring the cost down about twenty percent by waiving those costs. 7:23 And then finally, what, what we've been looking at is tying these units that are able to collect data 7:30 to what we've been calling living labs or if you think of a clinic on steroids that could actually do something with this data. 7:37 Those, uh, opportunities to rent out, say, the first floor of a, of a high-rise, low-income housing project to a university or a clinic would help subsidize the construction above and also maybe even pay for net zero construction systems. 7:52 So when we look at this, I mean, we have great opportunities right now to really extend the idea of what we're doing. 7:59 When you talk about prefabrication, you talk about it's housing that's differently than what we've been thinking about in traditional housing, and now it's just thinking outside that box that we kind of always pigeonhole ourselves in the thinking. 8:12 So is, is there really something we could be thinking about, or again, is this just something that's a dream? I mean, you know, there's so much going on Capitol Hill right now. 8:21 Uh, is it really something we can see, or do we gotta get a bunch of lobbyists, we gotta get a bunch of people who listen to this and say, "Look, we can make something happen if we really wanna make it happen"? Yeah. 8:32 There's some, there's some really powerful stories coming out of people thinking about population health, and, and the ability to deploy it will really depend on policy. 8:41 So a lot of cities that are contemplating the investment in a gigabit network, um, and are, are looking at, at what that means, and, and a lot of times it's reduced to [laughs] autonomous driving and faster streaming times for games and movies, but honestly, one of the things we've been looking at is, is it's, it's not sexy, but smart toilets. 9:00 [laughs] Smart toilets that could take your hydration readings and then couple that data to an automated medicine dispenser could revolutionize the way heart medication is dispensed, right? 9:11 So those kind of solutions that would happen with this kind of investment would revolutionize geriatric medicine and reduce the number of readmits after a heart attack, things like that. 9:22 The other thing that we've been looking at is how this population health would tie in for an entire community. 9:26 So one of the things we've been looking at is if you did have the possibility of deploying this at the scale of a neighborhood or the scale of a city, let's say you have five hundred thousand people living in a city, and you're collecting data on their sleep, and you know that someone has only gotten four hours of sleep over the last few nights. 9:43 And then you look at their hydration levels dropping, and then you see that they've started to limp on one side over the last day or two, and then you cross-reference that with data that we don't even know the implications yet. 9:54 So for instance, it's a full moon or it's the end of the month, and so people are starting to ration their, their medication. You look at weather patterns, and it's cold, and there's ice on the sidewalk outside. 10:05 In that city of five hundred thousand people, you could begin to do predictive analytics and pinpoint, say, twenty people that have a ninety-nine point nine percent chance of falling the next day. 10:15 That's really powerful information. 10:18 So now I understand, Joe, why in Independence Day they said toilets cost twenty-five thousand dollars a piece because if I urinate, they can track my urine, and if I snore a lot, now I can have someone tracking it. 10:31 You just explained this all to me. Now I never understood that why in Independence Day everything costs so much. You just explained it to me quickly in one swoof discussion here. 10:39 But all kidding aside- Let me say, let me say one- Go ahead. 10:42 Let me say one more thing about the smart toilet because it's, it's really interesting because as architects, I'm not so interested in testing the hydration in urine. 10:49 But putting a wall-mounted toilet with electricity, plumbing, refrigerant line, data port into a two-hour rated wall is really complicated. 10:57 [laughs] So getting doctors to figure that out is not gonna be easy, so we're, we're happy to be involved with that kind of assembly. All right. Here's what I want you to do, though, Joe. We're running out of time. 11:07 Quickly, tell my listeners where they can go so they can contact you to make this case happen. Yeah. Our, our, we can, uh, we can tell you more about this at ku.edu. Just go to the, uh, architecture department. 11:20 We have all kinds of information up there. Hey, Joe. Thanks for, uh, joining me today. I hope we get a chance to talk more about it. I wish you guys continued success at, uh, KU. I love you guys. 11:30 It's been great talking to you. Thank you for having me. All right. Listeners, we're out of time. You know what? We love those guys at KU. [upbeat music] They do a whole lot of great stuff. 11:39 So University of Kansas doing some terrific things. So remember, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT. With great technology comes great responsibility. So stick around. 11:49 We've got more to come right here on The Peggy Smedley Show. Signal to noise, an electronic term with new relevance on the internet. 12:05 Connected World Media cuts through the noise of data overload and finds you the signal of important information.Information that will keep you current and aware of context in the Internet of Things. 12:16 Peggy Smedley shares her insights on The Peggy Smedley Show and in Connected World magazine, all online at connectedworld.com. 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