School of Information Technology

Singapore is building the world's first Smart Nation by harnessing technology to the fullest with the aim of improving the lives of citizens, creating more opportunities, and building stronger communities. To support this national initiative, NYP and Microsoft entered a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the 8 June 2016, to establish the Smart Nation Innovation Centre.

The Centre plans to synergize capabilities and resources from both NYP and Microsoft to develop talents in Smart Nation related technologies as well as create innovative smart citizen-centric software solutions aligned with Singapore Smart Nation’s vision. These solutions aim to address challenges faced by major cities, especially in the areas of Urban Density, Aging Population, Healthcare, Mobility and Energy Sustainability.

The Centre also serves as an innovation hub to collaborate with the industry on projects, applied research and development as well as conduct professional courses on Microsoft technologies and the Internet of Things. 

SNIC launched to a successful start with the following projects in collaboration with the industry. These cross-disciplinary projects brought together both NYP staff and students from the School of Information Technology (SIT), School of Engineering (SEG), School of Health Sciences (SHS) and the Smart Campus Programme Office (SCPO).

• Singapore Unlocked
  This project proposed a system for enhanced citizen and visitor experience through 3D-immersive audio guided by an intelligent headset. This headset would communicate with a range of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and aggregate the sensor data with ambient intelligence in the cloud to provide an extraordinary sense of the surrounding environment. This would enhance visitors’ experience and compel them to explore more.

• Smart Security Patrol Monitoring System
  This project capitalized on NYP’s dense campus wireless access points as position beacons. The Smart Security Patrol Monitoring System included a mobile app for the patrol guards. With the beacons signals, it would allow the command centre to monitor the patrol guards’ location online in real-time. The command centre would also be equipped with various types of event alerts, like patrol route deviation, and guards who are stationary along patrol routes. Patrol routes records could also be stored to provide the base for analytics. The project also aimed to create a prototype to demonstrate the use of robots for security patrol, complementing the human patrol guards.

• Smart Office Analytics System
  This project provided multiple platforms (such as mobile app, web app and Microsoft Outlook) for employees to book meeting rooms. Each meeting room would be installed with IoT sensors to monitor the environment parameters such as temperature, light luminance and occupancy status. The system’s analytics function would aggregate the sensor data and room booking information, using Microsoft Azure technology to provide valuable insights on the actual meeting room utilization.

• Silver Tune
  Music Therapy (MT) is an established health profession in which music is used to address physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of individuals. However, for patients who suffer from stroke or dementia, handling the delicate musical instruments is a challenge. Students from SIT and SHS would be working on SilverTune, a smart IoT musical device which could be transformed into multiple musical instruments such as a recorder and saxophone. It also included a mobile app to assist in performing music therapy anywhere and anytime. SilverTune would be able to adapt to elderly patients’ cognitive and physical disability to overcome barriers of music playing. In addition, it would improve the productivity of therapists by cutting down the time required to monitor elderly patients on-site. This system could also record data quantitatively to facilitate data analytics.