Digital Cities & Citizens

The Lund company Sensative connects sensors in many Swedish cities

Caroline Wendt
January 17, 2022

Future by Lund’s project Smart Public Environments consists of more than twenty sub-projects. One partner that is involved in almost all of them is Sensative. Sensative’s IoT-platform Yggio receives and reports sensor data to different networks. Mats Pettersson, CEO at Sensative, explains how Sensative got involved in the project thanks to Future by Lund’s initiative. The participation became crucial. Sensatives platform for buildings has changed to be a platform for smart cities. Now, Sensative is working with a large number of cities.

Many projects have been realized under the roof of the SOM-projektet (SOM is Smarta Offentliag Miljöer wich means Smart Public Spaces) which was launched in 2017. The projects revolve around finding advantages with the usage of sensors and IoT for the public space. Sensative was involved in almost all the projects and their sensor platform Yggio has collected data on the habitat of plants, how full garbage bins are, parking lots and the electricty network. Sensative has also been involved in building the LoRaWAN network, which is Lund’s sensor network. Moreover, Sensative helped with supporting and educating people who wanted to test and develop services and things in the network. Although Sensative’s participation turned out to be central to the project it wasn’t until the application for the pre-project SOM 1 was underway that Sensative joined the project.  

– It was Per Persson, Head of Business at Lund Municipality, who came and tapped me one the shoulder and said that the project could be something for Sensative, says Mats Pettersson, CEO at Sensative. At that point Yggio wasn’t used in the context of smart cities since our only focus was on properties and in an early phase.

Mats Pettersson, CEO at Sensative.

After a few months and some discussions between Sensative and, among others, LTH as well as Future by Lund an agreement was found on how to set up the first IoT network to stimulate growth in the IoT sector in Lund. The group applied for project financing for a LoRa network - which was granted. They kicked off the project by installing three LoRa Gateways which spanned over big parts Lund.

– Without the SOM project we would maybe still be mainly manage housing, says Mats Pettersson. LoRa was new, we learned how it works and built a platform with the help of, among others, an open source platform for LoRa which is today a component of Yggio.

Since then more cities together with municipal infrastructure companies and municipally owned housing companies have started using Yggio. Cities who are using Yggio are for example Malmö, Lund, Helsingborg, Kristianstad, Eslöv, Halmstad, Stockholm, Sundbyberg, Linköping, Växjö, Kalmar and Örebro. The platform is about to be installed in even more municipalities.  

For Sensative, SOM has also significantly increased other collaborations with, for example, Rise, Lund University and Kraftringen. The project also led to intensified collaboration with actors they have worked together with previously such as T-Kartor, Sensefarm och Bintel. The number of employees doubled during the projects time from 15 to 30. Mats Pettersson estimates that about half of the increase is due to the project.

Sensative is not only an active partner of Future by Lund but is also involved in many other projects with a different focus. To name a few, some of the projects they are involved with are SIFIS Home which focusses on a safe and smart home, Connected Ship which is like smart city but on a ship, A5Guard – an EU-project about healthcare via 5G in remote places and the security project CritiSec.   Sensative also participates in two projects about AI, agriculture, weather and apps. Ellos is a project where Sensative shall optimise the energy sheet of buildings in cooperation with the real estate company Örebroporten.

– We would have basically lacked the prerequisites to realise all those projects – with the exemption of maybe the property project Ellos – if we would not have realized SOM and the other projects with Future by Lund. We had a platform for buildings but we lacked the connection between society and buildings, says Mats Pettersson.

The SOM-project is already finished but a successor project, Lund Open Sensoring City (LOSC), started in autumn 2020. The aim of the new project is to develop an open testbed for a connected society that is being steered by real-time data and where people, organisations, infrastructures and the sensor system work together to create a sustainable environment and a high life quality.

– The living lab that LOSC creates makes it possible for us to offer something entirely unique for other actors. The concept is an important arena which we use during applications for both EU-projects and in other contexts. To be able to show that we have this testbed is really attractive and a good base for everything else. Some research projects have the problem that they don’t have an arena to connect with and show the results. LOSC brings with it a big advantage for us, says Mats Pettersson.

Which advantages has the FBL-project brought for Sensative?

* Many new partners for collaboration.

* Broader orientation – from a housing platform to a platform for the smart city.

* More employees and increased deals.

* Better prerequisites to participate in other projects.

*Participation in testbed makes the company more attractive.'

Translation by Christin Scheller

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