Mitaka City: Paw Collection field trial   

The purpose of this field trial is to motivate elderly people to go out more frequently and take longer walk for preventing from the status they need nursing care by using an application called “Paw Collection”.

It motivates elderly citizens to go out by providing interesting information such as event or city information provided by citizens, stores, event organizers and city.

The basic idea is that citizens leave their footprint where they go or what they do, and they get a lot of paws as foot prints. Users show paws to other users and they collect paws.

“Paw Collection” application is a Social Network Service with Sensor Data. Paw is a kind of People’s experience, such as « go to the Mitaka Central Library » or « visit community center 3 times ». The paw is posted as an article with sensor data on the SNS. Other users can challenge it and when the user achieves it, their terminals automatically detect the achievement. Status of the achievement of paw is shown in a chat window, so that they can discuss with knowing others experience.

Screenshot of Paw Collection

Distribution of BLE and NFC tags in Mitaka

“Paw Collection” is a SNS application with sensor data. User can experience which was done by other user. The achievement is managed by the application in mobile phones or tablets.

By preparing the contents with the attractive spot information, “Paw Collection” motivates citizens to go out and walk more, to know things about local city and talk with other users, and to help create/activate local community.

Let’s say that one citizen posts “There are beautiful cherry blossom in Inokashira park” with a photo. The reactions of viewers to this post may be followings;

1. I saw the post,
2. I also went there because I saw the post,
3. I went there because I noticed that many people went there.

Integration with ClouT platform

The picture below shows the general architecture of the “Paw collection” field trial application following the ClouT three layers representation. For most of components, functionalities for “Paw collection” can be mapped on to the reference architecture of ClouT project.

Currently, the “Paw collection” application does not use ClouT CIaaS and CPaaS components because those components were not available in well-formed manner when the development of “Paw Collection” started in Feb 2014. However, ClouT CIaaS and CPaaS components will be integrated in the latest version of the field trial (Nov. 2015).

Expected impact:

“Paw Collection” application will allow elderly people to share activities with people who have the same hobbies or favorite things, while taking health benefits from these activities. Through communication about actual visit to attractive spots in local cities, local community can be activated.