Barcelona Digital City

Is it possible to capture the state of the city in real time? Is it possible to find out how it breathes, how it moves, how it suffers or how it becomes great? If the answer to all of these questions was yes, it would require a lot of people constantly watching what happens every minute of every day in every district of Barcelona.

Impossible, right? What if all of this information was provided by thousands of sensors? That is precisely what the open-source software Sentilo does (the term means 'sensor' in Esperanto). It won the 2016 Open Awards as the most innovative open-source software platform.

The advantage of it being open-source software (published in a repository) is that any city in the world can adapt it and do what Barcelona has done. Other administrations and businesses that want to process large amounts of information can also do it. When we say that "Barcelona wants to go beyond the smart city", it is precisely through this kind of project, sharing solutions and experiences, that this can be achieved.

This network of sensors knows the flow of people and bicycles along the city's biggest roads and arteries, the decibel levels on each street, the temperature of each neighbourhood and the quality of the air being breathed.