A start-up is born at the Polytechnic University of Turin. “From the PC we also monitor the health of bridges.”
It will be the first school in the city equipped with a black box. Continuously monitored to know if there are static problems, well before cracks appear, but also to measure the quality of life inside. The experiment of a start-up born in I3p, the incubator of the Politecnico, starts in Turin; it is called Sysdev and has developed Shbox.
“Sensors are a bit like skin for the human body: they sense the environment and translate it into numbers to be analyzed by artificial intelligence,” explain Marco Bonvino and Leo Italiano, a.d. of the startup. They feel we are at the beginning “of a paradigm shift: we believe the ‘black box’ will become as normal for a building as it is for an airplane.”
Armstrong Elementary School is in the semi-suburbs and is also home to the District. It was chosen by the City of Turin because it is part of a neighborhood where various technological innovations are being experimented with. The school will be plastered with 50 small boxes, Shboxes the size of a fist but capable of collecting a flood of data. Structural ones: tilt, deformation and temperature, to see if there are stability problems, and to see the evolution of the building over time; for example, what is its reaction to an earthquake shock.