Digital city, 5G is just the appetizer

In the past few days, the cold front has hit, but the Pudong Tangqiao Nursing Home is warm and cozy. With the 5G network, smart mattresses and bracelets are close to the body, which monitor the physical condition of the elderly with chronic diseases such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases in real time; the camera probes and smoke detectors throughout the public areas of the hospital and connected to the smart elderly care data platform in the city provide a safe and warm living environment for the elderly. Such big data-enabled applications are expected to become commonplace in Shanghai's elderly care scene in the future.

Yesterday, the full text of the "Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting the Digital Transformation of Shanghai's City" was released, which for the first time made a detailed outline of the great significance, overall requirements, transformation methods and key points, as well as innovative mechanisms of comprehensively promoting the digital transformation of the city.

At the beginning of 2021, the first year of the 14th Five-Year Plan, why did Shanghai launch the "Digital City"? As the saying goes, heroes are made by the times, and its launch is not accidental. In 2020, many people lamented that it was too difficult, but danger and opportunity always coexist, and overcoming danger is an opportunity. In 2003, the SARS epidemic promoted the start of digital industries such as e-commerce; the new crown pneumonia epidemic pushed the digital economy to a new level. Online platforms such as Dingdong Maicai and Hema Fresh have made many people accustomed to the convenience of shopping without leaving home. The application of big data in tracking the spread of the epidemic and the convenience of drones in measuring body temperature have made the digital economy show great vitality.

The Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee stressed the need to unswervingly build a digital China. In the "Proposal of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of Shanghai and the Vision for 2035", it is also clearly stated that promoting the digital transformation of the city will be written into the guiding ideology, and arrangements for digital development will be made. The term "digital city" highlights the new trend of Shanghai's digital transformation and development in the future, and highlights its distinctive characteristics.

The digital city of the future will not be a one-man show, but will insist on overall transformation to promote the comprehensive digital transformation of "economy, life, and governance". For example, in the future, to achieve the road trip with "driverless cars", in addition to testing the "intelligence of single cars", it is also inseparable from the intelligence of roads. Huang Gang, deputy director of China Mobile Shanghai Industrial Research Institute, said that we need to use smart cars and have smart roads. "Through vehicle-road collaboration, cameras and sensing devices are set up on the roadside. It can transmit information that people cannot see to the 'driverless car', allowing it to predict and respond in time. It is a very typical application of vehicle-road collaboration."

"Digital + City" is not a fragmented link, but insists on all-round empowerment to build a basic framework of data-driven digital cities. "If 4G has changed our lives, then 5G will change our society." Xu Shugong, director of the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Communications and Data Science, said when looking forward to the vision of 5G technology, compared with previous generations, the most important difference of 5G is that it has opened a new era of "people-things" and "things-things" communication, which can connect everything.

Digital cities are not just a technological "upgrade and monster-killing", but also a revolutionary reshaping. Through comprehensive digital transformation, we will promote all-round process reengineering, rule reconstruction, function shaping, and ecological construction in all areas of the city, and create a new way of production and living and development path. For example, Shanghai is vigorously developing "one-stop service" and "one-network management", which can extend its "tentacles" to key areas such as public safety, emergency management, traffic management, market supervision, and ecological environment with the help of the "east wind" of digital cities, and weave a "global safety net" for the people in terms of air, water, food, and transportation; by breaking through the information barriers between various departments, the "hidden" numbers can be brought to life and used.

Digital cities sound very "technical", but they are actually closely related to every citizen. In the future digital city, citizens also need to reshape their cognitive abilities and thinking patterns in the digital age, pay more attention to their own data management, credit maintenance, privacy protection, and collaborative governance, so that everyone can become a producer, manager, user, and beneficiary of data; digitalization can stimulate the vitality of every cell in the city's life body, allowing citizens to start a new model of happiness in the digital city.