Dublin, Antwerp and Manchester will gather fresh insights into cycling through a new project with BT's IoT data hub, IoT-enabled smart lighting manufacturer See.Sense, and the European Commission.

Between July 2016 and June 2018 Manchester’s CityVerve project set out to create a blueprint for smart cities of the future. BT joined with 20 other organisations to collaborate on the project, with BT researchers from Adastral Park creating an IoT Data Hub that brought together about 200 separate data feeds from the City. BT are now set to expand its LoT Data hub to support a new project that will take place in 3 cities across Europe.

BT and award-winning SME SeeSense will collaborate in the SynchroniCity programme, which is funded by the European Commission. The project will take data including speed and location information from SeeSense's smart cycle lights, analyse and visualise the data through BT’s DataHub and then share the output with the cities. Two hundred lights will be distributed in both Manchester and Dublin, and 400 in Antwerp.

“We want to validate the scalability of the hub across multiple locations and with an increased volume of data,” said Professor John Davies, Chief Researcher, Future Business Technology, BT. “[We want to] deliver more insights into the way cyclists travel to optimise the value of investment in cycling infrastructure and get people out of their cars and onto their bikes.”

See.Sense were crowned winners of a BT competition in 2016 and received a £15,000 prize fund to help with their project. The award-winning lights are designed specifically to be daylight-visible, enhancing cyclist safety in all lighting conditions, while flashing brighter and faster in riskier situations such as round junctions and roundabouts.