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Smart healthy cities and regions

© little_rat / stock.adobe.comEdited by Maged N. Kamel Boulos
International Journal of Health Geographics

Thanks to the transformative power of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its core and complementary technologies, cities around the world, as well as less urbanized regions and the countryside, are rapidly becoming 'smart' in very many ways, offering us healthier and happier places to live in. IoT is made of sensors and other components that connect our version of the world made of atoms (i.e., us humans, our body systems/health, our devices, vehicles, roads, buildings, plants, animals, etc.) with a mirror digital version made of bits. This connection enables cities and regions, urban and rural, to be self-aware and dynamically reconfigurable in real- or near-real-time, based on the changes in populations and environment that are continuously monitored and captured by sensors, and similar to the way the internal biological systems of a living being operate and respond to their environment. The big data collected by various IoT sensors can also help predict the immediate future with reasonable accuracy, which enables better planned responses/mitigation.

  1. The moulding together of artificial intelligence (AI) and the geographic/geographic information systems (GIS) dimension creates GeoAI. There is an emerging role for GeoAI in health and healthcare, as location ...

    Authors: Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Guochao Peng and Trang VoPham
    Citation: International Journal of Health Geographics 2019 18:7
  2. A PubMed query run in June 2018 using the keyword ‘blockchain’ retrieved 40 indexed papers, a reflection of the growing interest in blockchain among the medical and healthcare research and practice communities...

    Authors: Maged N. Kamel Boulos, James T. Wilson and Kevin A. Clauson
    Citation: International Journal of Health Geographics 2018 17:25
  3. The latest generation of virtual and mixed reality hardware has rekindled interest in virtual reality GIS (VRGIS) and augmented reality GIS (ARGIS) applications in health, and opened up new and exciting opport...

    Authors: Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Zhihan Lu, Paul Guerrero, Charlene Jennett and Anthony Steed
    Citation: International Journal of Health Geographics 2017 16:7
  4. Our health depends on where we currently live, as well as on where we have lived in the past and for how long in each place. An individual’s place history is particularly relevant in conditions with long laten...

    Authors: Maged N. Kamel Boulos and Jennifer Le Blond
    Citation: International Journal of Health Geographics 2016 15:5
  5. This paper provides a brief overview of, and elaborates on, some of the presentations, discussions and conclusions from Day 4 of the ‘WHO EURO 2014 International Healthy Cities Conference: Health and the City ...

    Authors: Maged N Kamel Boulos, Agis D Tsouros and Arto Holopainen
    Citation: International Journal of Health Geographics 2015 14:3
  6. This article gives a brief overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) for cities, offering examples of IoT-powered 21st century smart cities, including the experience of the Spanish city of Barcelona in implemen...

    Authors: Maged N Kamel Boulos and Najeeb M Al-Shorbaji
    Citation: International Journal of Health Geographics 2014 13:10
  7. 'Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two years earlier than Goodchild's term 'Volunteered Geographic Information'. Six years later (2005-2011), OpenStreetM...

    Authors: Maged N Kamel Boulos, Bernd Resch, David N Crowley, John G Breslin, Gunho Sohn, Russ Burtner, William A Pike, Eduardo Jezierski and Kuo-Yu Slayer Chuang
    Citation: International Journal of Health Geographics 2011 10:67