DUBAI, 7 January 2022 – Start-ups from around the world have competed to create mobility solutions for future smart cities, doing so sustainably and efficiently, as part of the Future Mobility Hack, taking place at Expo 2020 Dubai from 9-13 January, in conjunction with Expo 2020’s official infrastructure digitalisation partner, Siemens.
The start-ups were invited to create an Internet of Things (IoT) app that utilises Siemens’ MindSphere technology. At Expo 2020 Dubai, the ground-breaking MindSphere Smart City App and IoT framework have been designed and built to bring the physical Expo site into the digital world, around the event’s subtheme of Mobility. This has enabled Expo 2020 to meet its goal of being the most sustainable Expo to date, through smart monitoring of factors such as carbon footprint calculation, energy and water metering.
Participants in the hackathon were tasked with coming up with solutions that would meaningfully tackle issues around the future of mobility; environmental monitoring; intelligent traffic management experiences; mobility open data solutions to create cities for the future; make rail and road travel more secure and sustainable; use digital services to increase the availability of infrastructure, optimise throughput and improve quality of life in cities; and new ways of monitoring, controlling and analysing bridges and tunnels to ensure safety and security.
Participants could choose which major challenge they wanted to tackle and were asked to showcase their digital solution to create the future of mobility.
In November last year, shortlisted participants were invited to an online boot camp to refine their ideas, before being whittled down to the successful five finalists. These finalists will now participate in the Future Mobility Hack at Expo 2020, where they will be given the opportunity to further develop their solutions, before pitching their ideas to the final jury. To ensure Covid-19 safety for all participants at the event, some finalists will compete on-site, and others remotely.
The five Future Mobility Hack finalists are:
- Ualabee (Argentina)
Ualabee, which will participate on-site, is a big-data mobility company that integrates schedules and routes of urban transportation, micro-mobility and ride-hailing services, offering citizens the best way to commute. The idea is to provide Data-Analytics Tools, Trip-Planner APIs and Transit Alerts for governments, companies and start-ups, helping them to understand people’s mobility behaviour and solve urban mobility planification.
- Exomotion (Switzerland)
Exomotion, which will participate on-site, is on a mission to enhance the quality of life for people of determination by providing robotic transportation services in indoor environments such as airports and hospitals. The company aims to provide automated mobility services for people with reduced mobility and uses MindSphere as its main cloud platform for monitoring and managing devices, IoT sensors and actuators in the environment.
- DX Digital Africa (South Africa)
DX Digital Africa, which will participate remotely, is a data engineering company specialising in utilising automotive data for predictive and efficient vehicle management – both for fleet and individual vehicle owners. The Mindsphere platform enables the company’s own MotoX platform to process time-series vehicle data for analysis and the generation of actionable insights for the predictive and cost-efficient maintenance of vehicles.
- Breeze Technologies (Germany)
Breeze Technologies, which is participating on-site, is a technology leader for air quality sensors, data and clean air action intelligence. The start-up helps cities and businesses to design more efficient, clean air action plans with AI and IoT. Breeze Technologies is enabling MindSphere to integrate real-time and historical air quality datasets for better decision making in urban planning and traffic management processes.
- THOR CHARGE (Germany)
THOR CHARGE supports the transition towards fully electric and sustainable mobility, by enabling efficient planning and the use of charging stations and other resources via AI. Its idea is an easy-to-use, interactive and fast application for electric fleet and infrastructure operators. MindSphere enables the company to deepen the IoT approach and expand the scope and scale of its solution.
