Green Bear - A LoRaWAN-based Human-in-the-Loop case-study for sustainable cities

Citizens are a crucial factor in the sustainability of the cities because they are one of the pillars for balancing their environment. Smart city projects can offer citizens an opportunity to understand how they contribute to their city’s sustainability. Furthermore, an interactive smart city system can create synergies that benefit both the citizens and the city itself. This paper presents the Green Bear smart city platform, an IoT Human-in-the-Loop system that uses LoRaWAN nodes to gather information on city green spaces, bike lanes, and recycling depots. A user-centered mobile application that allows for active user participation, feedback, and incentivization is used to close the loop with humans. This system allows citizens to evaluate their participation in aspects that improve the city’s sustainability through a gamification scheme, obtaining points for different activities in the city’s public spaces and personal activities to improve their quality of life. This solution is being implemented in the city of Coimbra, Portugal. After an overview of the system, the paper describes each main system module. The Green Bear prototype was subject to functional and technological assessment, and the results are presented and discussed.