Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) will pilot the use of sensors to support elderly citizens, it was announced this week.
The scheme will place sensors around people’s homes to watch for irregular patterns in their behaviour, the Prime Minister said. If changes occur, neighbours and family members can be alerted - allowing technology to augment the government’s care for an ageing population.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that: “By 2030, there are going to be 900,000 people in Singapore, 65 and over... Our Smart Nation vision can radically change how we approach the idea of active ageing”.
Prime Minister Lee also announced a new office in his own department to monitor the government’s Smart Nation strategy, which plans to use sensors to improve aspects of public service delivery, including mobile payments, driverless cars and tele-medicine.
The Smart Nation Programme Office will sit in the Prime Minister’s department because “we have to pull the pieces together from all over the Government,” he said.
The Prime Minister also warned of the cybersecurity risks of sensor technology and said that there would be further reorganisations. “It is vital that we have secure systems that we can trust, not just preventing credit card numbers from being stolen, but protecting ourselves from malicious attacks where there is hacking or Distributed Denial of Service attacks”.
“We already have cyber security duties residing in Ministry of Home Affairs and the Infocomm Development Authority. But I do not think that they are as strong as we would like them to be. We need to reorganise them, to strengthen our system and our institutions. We are studying how best to do that, to protect our Government systems, including the Smart Nation sensor systems, against cyber-attacks.”
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Quelle/Source: futureGov, 28.11.2014
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