TCS and SMU announce extension of SMU-TCS iCity Lab Partnership

These will include developing technology solutions specifically tailored to the needs of senior citizens in Singapore under a research grant secured from the Government of Singapore last week for the SHINESeniors Project.

The iCity Lab was established in August 2011 within the SMU School of Information Systems as a three year research collaboration whereby SMU and TCS would work together on research related to intelligent cities.

Over the last three years, the Lab has achieved its major research objectives and accomplished several flag-ship projects across the intelligent city domain, including a deep focus on ageing and chronic disease management, as well as personalized community healthcare services.

The SHINESeniors (Smart Homes and Intelligent Neighbours to Enable Seniors) Project is an iCity Lab-initiated effort to make community care services effective through innovations in care delivery by leveraging Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

Sensor-enabled homes will be developed in support of ageing-in-place for senior citizens living in Singapore. Through SHINESeniors, it is hoped that the cost of care delivery will be lowered significantly given the lower reliance on manpower. SMU-TCS iCity Lab will be working with multiple stakeholders, including several government agencies and community partners, to implement the project over three years.

Professor Steven Miller, Dean of School of Information Systems and Vice Provost (Research) at SMU said, “Singapore faces major challenges in providing care and support for our senior citizens due to the fact that the number of post-retirement people aged 65 and older is increasing faster than that of the working population age of 20 to 64. From a demographic perspective, this means Singapore’s “old-age support ratio” is decreasing – for each senior citizen, there is a smaller number of working age people to provide social and economic support."

"This is the core challenge we are now concentrating on at the iCity Lab. We conceptualised and designed the SHINESeniors Project to help Singapore tackle some of the challenges relating to this situation. We can contribute by leveraging our expertise in urban information management, in data analytics, and in bringing ICT and people together in helpful and harmonious ways. Through the iCity Lab, we look forward to continue working closely with TCS to undertake socially relevant and impactful research for these types of real world challenges," Miller said.

The iCity Lab will be working with SMU’s well-known Living Analytics Research Centre (LARC) for data analytics support. In addition, SMU’s School of Social Sciences will contribute to the SHINESeniors project by working on a related longitudinal survey, and by contributing to the analysis of collected data from social science perspectives.

As the core technology collaborator in the SHINESeniors Project, TCS’s contribution will include building a home-care platform with emphasis on the analytics module.

It is a software solution that has sense-making algorithms for detecting and understanding elderly mobility patterns, which can then be used for remote monitoring and analysis by doctors and community caregivers. The TCS home-care platform will have the ability to personalise the appropriate community care plan, plan for social service support needs, and situation-specific community-care response protocols for each individual elderly person.

Vish Iyer, President of TCS Asia Pacific, based in Singapore, said “With the rapid proliferation of IoT technologies, we are today in a connected universe. Leveraging TCS’ core strengths, the SMU-TCS iCity Lab aims to design and develop a sustainable living environment for seniors in Singapore, thereby uplifting their current lifestyle. This research will lead to the development of an end-to-end personalized care delivery platform from sense making to emergency response services. Our collaboration with SMU has yielded fruitful results over the years. I am confident these researches have been useful and have brought about a positive impact to our society.”