Big data employed by SW China's Guiyang to make life more convenient

Big data is nowadays widely applied in Guiyang, capital of Southwest China's Guizhou Province to facilitate the daily life of citizens, from upgrading the management of street vendors to offering smart care at nursing homes.

Erqi Road in Guiyang's Nanming district is known for its food vendors. The 400-meter road which has 96 stalls is visited by at least 80,000 people per day, even during the off season.

Although the road is now kept in good order, it once faced many problems. Huddles of small booths produced thick cooking smoke and polluted environment, posing a huge challenge for supervision, according to Gan Xiaohui, a vendor who has witnessed the changes to the food street.

Local authorities made painstaking efforts to solve these problems, but still wasn't able to find a cure due to the complicated situation in the food street.

Fortunately, changes came in March 2019 when Nanming district piloted standardized management in the food street. By employing big data, the market regulation bureau of the district started managing the food street under an intelligent governance platform to guarantee food safety and sanitation.

Now, every food vendor has a QR code pasted on their uniform shop signs. By scanning the QR code, customers and market regulation officials can check the vendor's business and health certificates, said Guo Lei, deputy chief of food safety office at the market regulation bureau of Nanming district.

The management team of the food street carries out random inspections every day, and the community administrators also examine the food stalls irregularly, Guo introduced, adding that photos would also be taken by regulation officials occasionally. All of the information will be recorded and uploaded to the intelligent governance platform, and shared with relevant parties.

"The improved environment is helping attract more visitors," said Gan. Now, there are several screens on the street displaying the credits and rankings of the food vendors. "The precision of the management requires us to be more meticulous in running our business, think more for the customers and make more efforts," Gan noted.

Starting from 2017, big data has been employed by an elderly care service center in the city's Guanshanhu district to develop smart elderly care.

"We equip the seniors with smart bracelets, sleep monitors and other smart devices to track their movement, heart rate and sleep quality, which helps monitor their chronic diseases," said Yang Fanjia, deputy head of the elderly care service center.

For example, if a senior gets up to use the bathroom at night and doesn't fall back within five minutes, care givers would receive an alarm and then go to check what happens.

To improve management efficiency, the center has set up an intelligent management platform which can be accessed through a mobile application by care givers, seniors and their children, as well as the head of the center.

"A senior with cognitive disorder once left the service center, and it was the movement information recorded by his bracelet that helped our care givers to position him on the mobile application," Yang introduced.

The service center has also planned a variety of activities for the seniors, including singing, reading, watching movies, and making handicrafts, Yang said.

"With intelligent equipment, workers at the service center could always come to help us in times of need," said Du Guanghua, an 84-year-old man who started living in the service center since 2014.

"The smart services are very reassuring and helpful, which saves us the trouble of finding a nursing worker at home," Du added.

So far, many places in Guiyang have employed big data to build smart elderly care platforms, providing services such as smart home, health examination and home nursing care.