Qualcomm Smart Cities partner weaves IoT lighting into large-scale digital twins

IoT product provider Zyter has partnered with Juganu, a technology company providing solutions for the professional lighting market, to weave advanced lighting tech into smart cities.

Zyter’s IoT platform breaks down information by integrating and consolidating data from devices and applications, weaving IoT infrastructure into large-scale smart city digital twins for buildings, stadiums, campuses, and cities. It allows municipalities to get visibility across a network of connected devices and sensors supported by analytics. Juganu uses light fixtures as the base for a self-orchestrated wireless grid that provides tech support for smart cities, which makes it a natural choice for this digital twin project.

“The partnership with Juganu will help us bring robust smart lighting, AI-enabled security, communication, and other capabilities to any of these verticals,” Zyter founder and CEO Sanjay Govil told VentureBeat.

Teaming up for smart city digital twins

The partnership will integrate Zyter’s core platform and Juganu’s lighting tech with tools and software from more than 400 Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program partners. Zyter is a core partner in Qualcomm’s program.

Juganu’s The Foam platform integrates with cameras, pedestrian counters, and edge computers to customize lighting and characterize foot traffic with privacy safeguards. Its latest lighting, which the company claims kills the COVID-19 virus, has attracted fresh funding from Comcast and NCR.

Previous Zyter partnerships have focused on construction safety (Everguard), clinical data management (TruCare), and remote patient monitoring (Ceiba). Its platform aims to unify app development across devices in verticals such as health care, education, logistics, retail, travel, and construction.

This partnership could also take advantage of Zyter’s work in creating lidar-based digital twins, which are virtual representations of an object or system that span its lifecycle, are updated with real-time data, and use simulation, machine learning, and reasoning to aid decision-making. Digital twins make it easier to interface with and control IoT devices in a certain space. For example, a city manager can now view and manage all the lights in both indoor and outdoor spaces. A manager can also explore areas of the city by pulling up camera surveillance feeds or reviewing all recorded incidents in an area while exploring the digital twin of a city or buildings and spaces in a city.

In the long run, Zyter’s CEO Govil believes there are opportunities to collaborate with other companies working on APIs for physical infrastructures, like the data infrastructure platform Mapped, to help with standardization and interoperability. Mapped simplifies access to physical building assets through a standard vocabulary while supporting a secured API perimeter.

“We feel that Mapped and Zyter are trying to solve similar problems, although in slightly different ways,” Govil said.