Citykinect wins Canadian Armed Forces “pop-up city” prize for energy, water, waste reduction with LPWAN technologies

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) must be ready to deploy on short notice, in any climate and for prolonged periods. The CAF presently relies on Relocatable Temporary Camps (RTCs) for its deployments that sustain personnel through demanding operational and environmental conditions.

Citykinect is a winner of a $10,000 round 1 prize in the Canadian Armed Forces “Pop-Up City” contest, part of the Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) Program. The challenge was to design and build a temporary camp prototype for the Canadian Armed Forces to operate in a temperate climate and that integrates management systems for energy, water and waste.

Rules of the contest stated the solution must be capable of supporting Canadian Armed Forces operations and must be effective in allowing the Forces to respond quickly in remote areas. It must also and scalable for up to 1,500 personnel, and be designed to be transportable.

For our winning content submission, we demonstrated that LPWAN technologies such as smart sensors and LoRAWAN, could help the mission of providing an integrated energy, water and waste management system by reducing the usage of these critical resources for Pop-Up Cities or mobile deployments by 30% or more.