Introduction
In June 2021, Fujitsu and the city of Kawasaki strengthened their seven-year collaboration on digital technologies to find novel solutions to the new challenges confronting communities, including the threats posed by climate change and Covid-19. The partners have identified Health, Safety and security, Environment and Work and living as the four focus areas for the latest phase of the project.
Kawasaki is the birthplace of Fujitsu. Currently more than 25,000 employees work in the city and more than 6,000 employees live there. Fujitsu aims to create a smart city by working in Kawasaki City to resolve various social issues using cutting edge technology in the four areas of health, safety and security, environment, and work and living. Specifically, we will develop a Social Digital Twin using five technologies (computing including HPC and quantum computers, networking, AI, data and security, and convergence) as a platform for solving social issues in these four focus areas.
Health and wellbeing is one of the key concerns mentioned by citizens in Kawasaki’s annual survey. With the arrival of Covid-19, health consciousness is increasingly seen as a community issue as well as a personal one. Fujitsu is working with the city of Kawasaki to use cutting-edge technologies to improve the health and wellbeing of citizens in the background, creating an active, personal but unobtrusive health support environment for everyone.
In 2021, Fujitsu and Kawasaki Frontale, a Fujitsu-sponsored professional football team, held an event in which Todoroki Stadium, Frontale’s home stadium,was replicated in a virtual space. Visitors were able to explore the stadium including closed areas such as the VIP area and locker rooms, as well as looking back on the highlights of the season in a digital space. The event showed how new fan contact points and entertainment can be created in the digital space as well as delivering an exciting experience during the pandemic.
Fujitsu, together with children from a school for the deaf in Kawasaki City, held a workshop to design the future of the school commute. By combining the ideas of children born here with the latest technologies in AI and HPC, we are developing and testing equipment that displays the station sounds and announcements as onomatopoeic symbols to make station information easier to understand visually. In addition to providing safe and secure accessibility to stations for people who are deaf, we also aim to promote mutual understanding between people with disabilities and those without disabilities through fun equipment that anyone can see – aiming for a society of diversity and inclusion.
Together with Kawasaki City, Fujitsu aims to create a society that encourages each and every citizen to change their behavior into a lifestyle that considers social issues. To realize a decarbonized society, Fujitsu is developing services to encourage citizens to take environmentally conscious actions. In designing and developing these services, it is important to listen to the voices of the citizens concerned. In 2021, we held an event on the theme of sustainability in cooperation with a retail store in Kawasaki City. Based on the opinions of the citizens who participated in the event, we are currently studying which kind of approach best leads to environmentally conscious actions by citizens.
Safety and security affect individuals and communities, from random road traffic accidents to major weather events. Fujitsu and Kawasaki city are working together to predict, mitigate and manage adverse events using technology.
In 2022, the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) at Tohoku University, the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, Fujitsu and the city of Kawasaki conducted a field trial of AI on the world’s fastest supercomputer, Japan’s Fugaku. This provides high resolution, real time tsunami flood forecasts to support safe and efficient tsunami evacuations during disaster prevention drills in Kawasaki. Participants are notified about the arrival time and flood height of a predicted tsunami through a special smartphone application developed by Fujitsu. The exercise aims to identify the most effective ways of using technology to support local communities in sharing information and avoiding cases of people being left behind during evacuations.