Do you know the number of hours residents of Greater Kuala Lumpur spend stuck in traffic in a single year? 250,000,000 hours (Source: Malaysia Economic Monitor June 2015, World Bank)
Smart city applications are developed with the goal of improving the management of people flows in and out of the cities and allowing for real time responses to the challenges faced in our daily life.
Providing convenient and rapid mobility, connectivity with social cohesion systems to today’s urban and suburban consumers can be challenging but possible. Imagine if you can have smart living tools at the palm of your hand using mobile phone as shown in the diagrams below. Start your day by using the “iPark™” to book a parking spot near the public transport terminal (e.g: Kelana Jaya Station) before leaving the house and then able to use the MySIM™ in the phone already activated with transport pre-paid credit to pay at a touch to ride the LRT to KL Sentral. While in the LRT, just use “Shopbuddy™” to order and purchase breakfast set at special price from food outlet (e.g: McDonald) where you can pick up when you arrive and share the promotion on social media with your friends. Just tap/scan to pick up your breakfast. Then, walk to your office and use the MySIM™ in the phone to open the office door access. While enjoying your breakfast in the office, you can log in to your “smart home app” to make sure your child is safe at home and use “Health app” to see how many calories you’re taking for breakfast this morning as well as how many steps you’ve walk from home to office.
This study seeks to explore Malaysian users in adopting a single platform E-payment system that supports the planning systems for smart cities using Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989). This research includes only respondents who have used either mobile phone or card or internet for E-payment in the last 12 months. A total of 698 respondents living in Malaysia urban and suburban area that fulfil the pre-set requirements were collected and used for this analysis. The explanatory power R² scores of perceived usefulness is at 81% and perceived ease of use is at 80%. Both showed very high acceptance in terms of usefulness and ease of use. However, with perceived risk as the negative (-) element has resulted the consumers’ intention to use explanatory power R² scores at 43%. This results showed that 43% of the respondents’ are the adopters of the single platform E-Payment system solution that is very good as according to Cohen (1998) > 25% is large. This research is related to the people, mobility culture on the integration of innovation technologies with business values that contribute toward green environment.
Acronym and information on the innovation technologies
iPark™ – iPark™ is an intelligent parking management system. It consists of two parts, hardware and software, each one consists of different sub-components. The goal is to enhance parking experience by enabling users to view and book parking lots, and use their phones as access cards to parking zones through Near Field Communication, PIN codes or computer vision technology. iPark saves fuel, time and promotes green environment.
MySIM™ - MySIM™ is designed to be used for public transport payment, shopping, e-tickets, banking, healthcare, office door, collection of loyalty points etc. This innovation brings convenience to our lives by providing one-stop access and E-payment for what we need simply by tapping our phone that has MySIM™. This technology is superior to any competing products in the current market because of its cutting- edge technology that looks like a regular SIM card but with combined Telecommunication SIM, Bankcard SIM and Transport SIM (Touch N Go) plus with an integrated hybrid antenna on the SIM itself which operates at 13.56 MHz that can be used for Card, Internet and Mobile Payment. MySIM™ works on any phone that uses the SIMCard.
Shopbuddy™ – The Shopbuddy™ will call-out your credit cards, loyalty cards and merchant discounts securely with direct link to shops and outlets on your mobile phone, helping you keep your life organised, and making quick purchases even quicker than before. In addition, Shopbuddy lets you skip the queue when booking and paying for the order (e.g: breakfast @ listed food outlet).
Smart Home app – Smart home automation hubs are a one-stop solution for unifying your connected gadgets and controlling them from one simple app, instead of many. Besides controlling the light bulbs etc, the more interesting one is to be able to see your child sleeping soundly and peacefully at home.
Health App - The Health app gives you an easy-to-read dashboard of your health and fitness data link to various devices. You may include the remarkable health and fitness apps on your mobile phone to work together, and work harder, for you. ... Food calories intake, number walking steps, calories burned, cholesterol, etc.
For more information:
Dr. Joan Lai
Head of Innovation & Biz Dev
UM Centre of Innovation & Commercialization (UMCIC),
University of Malaya, Malaysia
Tel: 603-79677351/603-79677977
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
