Improving public safety at fingertips: A smart city experience

Nowadays, we are in the century of cities: there are more people living in the cities than in the countryside. In general, overpopulated cities around the world have common problems in several areas, such as city administration, education, health care, public safety, transportation, utilities, etc. In the particular case of Brazil, one of the major problems of cities is the high level of violence. This paper describes how the Brazilian city of Natal is implementing technological systems in the context of public safety to transform itself into a smart city, as a cooperation between university and government secretariat. More specifically, the paper presents ROTA, a smart city platform aiming at contributing to improve public safety. We also hereby describe a robust, scalable mobile application that fulfills the communication gap between control room and field personnel, as well as a Web dashboard intended to support data analysis and statistics about occurrences.