The objective of this Smart and Connected Communities Planning Grant (SCC-PG) project is to explore the use of micromobility resources as an affordable and flexible micro-mobility solution to connect riders with employment and other life-essential needs. It envisions a dockless electric scooter sharing program that helps alleviate mobility inequality prevalent in distressed neighborhoods of Hartford, Connecticut.

Various programs have been established to extend and promote healthcare services to low-income rural Americans facing financial barriers. These programs offer a wide range of healthcare services at little to no cost. However, despite the availability of these services, challenges arise in bringing patients to healthcare providers in a timely manner for healthcare. Many individuals in rural communities are unable to receive recommended services, primarily due to transportation challenges.

Despite considerable efforts in combating substance use and exploring novel treatment and recovery strategies, current practices have not been able to connect many patients from underserved low-income communities in rural areas with available healthcare resources due to infrastructure challenges, inaccessibility to pharmacies, patient’s inability to drive, and lack of transportation. Responding to such issues involves interactions among diverse community stakeholders, including healthcare providers, research institutes, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and community residents.

For both parents and educators, monitoring and adjusting their behaviors to ensure that children develop appropriate prosocial and learning behaviors is a complex balance between nurturance and limit setting. When these interactions are strained, negative or coercive cycles may emerge that delay appropriate development and exacerbate existing impairment. To disrupt the development of coercive cycles, adults must have the ability to accurately assess the quality of their interactions with children and integrate this information into personal change.

This NSF Smart and Connected Community (S&CC) planning grant will set the groundwork for exploring a sustainable vertiport system capable of deploying autonomous drone swarms for methane emission measurements over orphaned wells. The planning grant will also scrutinize the responses of regulators and operators to the potential technological changes. These abandoned oil or gas wells, typically left behind by the fossil fuel extraction industry when operating expenses outstrip production rates, contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (CWA) often engage in severe problem behavior, and thus require long-term care with individualized clinical assessment, treatment, and intervention. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy, considered an evidence-based best practice, can be time-consuming, resource intensive, and prone to human bias.

Older adults strive to be independent and healthy yet compared with younger individuals, they are at greater risk of chronic health conditions and social isolation. Solutions are needed that create ways for older adults to thrive, connect, contribute to, and shape their communities.

Unsheltered homelessness has grown at staggering rates, particularly across West Coast cities such as San Diego. Unsheltered people are at higher risk than the general population of experiencing flooding risk, as they are more likely both to be living in the most flood-vulnerable locations as well as disconnected from existing flood warning systems. This predicament results in unequal disasters and environmental impact, burdening the most vulnerable people with the least information in critical moments.

Smart city platforms–encompassing mobile apps, cameras, sensors, algorithms, and predictive analytics—generate troves of data on residents. Research suggests that excessive surveillance reinforces a sense of insecurity and leads residents to fear civil liberties violations, particularly among communities of color. Our digital rights platform will empower community members by granting them agency over how the City collects, uses and stores their personal data.

This NSF Smart and Connected Communities project will employ a novel and multidisciplinary approach informed by community participation to detect, map, and analyze “near-miss” events that occur when a collision between a vulnerable road user, such as a bicyclist or pedestrian, and an automobile is narrowly avoided. Rising injury and fatality rates in the United States for vulnerable road users is an area of societal concern, and contribute to public hesitancy to walk or bicycle more.