Cities and communities in the U.S. and around the world are entering a new era of transformational change, in which their inhabitants and the surrounding built and natural environments are increasingly connected by smart technologies, leading to new opportunities for innovation, improved services, and enhanced quality of life.

Urban communities are increasingly including Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) in their watershed management plans to manage stormwater in cities. Stormwater programs are scientifically limited by a lack of knowledge of the longevity of GSI, how real-time adaptive control can improve performance, and lack of process for using collected data in new GSI designs and policy. Further, there is no scientifically robust method to consider social equity in GSI design and planning.

Responding to risk events involves interactions among diverse stakeholders (e.g. government agencies, non-profit organizations, community residents). Such interactions are typically unbalanced and inefficiently organized, which leads to coordination failures and inefficient response. Community-based social networks offer a critical resource during crisis response, whose capacity has been significantly enhanced with the ubiquitous usage of social media and smart devices.

Extreme heat is deadly and disproportionately affects the elderly and residents of low-income neighborhoods. Extreme heat and humidity events will increase in coming years. Lack of air-conditioning and the urban heat island effect create dangerous indoor conditions. Up to 60% of older, poorly built homes in low-income areas lack AC. Combining residents’ behavior and building characteristics in machine learning (SciML) and agent-based models (ABM) will identify when residents are exposed to overheating risks in their home and connect them with resources to mitigate dangerous conditions.

The exponential increase in extreme events over the last decade compels new methods of managing risk in communities exposed to recurring natural hazards. This project advances the National Science Foundation’s goal “Growing Convergence Research” to enable smart and connected communities by initiating and expanding collective learning capacity through integrating digital twin technologies and social games.

Clean and safe water is a basic necessity for a community to survive and thrive. However, millions of people are exposed to unsafe levels of drinking water contaminants including toxic and persistent heavy metals and ubiquitous “forever chemicals” such as per– and polyfluroalkyl substances (PFAS). Despite strict regulations, and well-established laboratory methods for detecting these widespread and persistent contaminants, these pollutants sometimes go undetected because of infrequent sampling and testing.

Communities across the world are experiencing a challenging paradox: accelerating development in the context of climate change. Often, the impacts are concentrated in disadvantaged communities, requiring new approaches to pursuing local and equitable solutions to climate resilience. Common SENSES will demonstrate such an approach by integrating cutting-edge science with community priorities in conjunction with a capital redevelopment of Blue Hill Ave. in Boston, MA, a long-neglected thoroughfare running through the heart of the city’s historically Black communities.

This project seeks to reduce loneliness in older adults who reside in long term care (LTC) communities through new augmented reality (AR) technology. Loneliness is a serious condition that is related to increases in heart disease, depression, suicide, mental and physical decline, and reduced quality of life and death. Two out of five older adults in the U.S. report being lonely. Even more alarming, three out of four LTC older adults experience loneliness. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its accompanying safety protocols, has intensified loneliness across the LTCs.

This Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) project will advance methods to improve end-to-end mobility for people with physical disabilities who rely on wheelchairs in their daily activities and encounter several barriers to their movement in the built environment. A typical mobility scenario involves navigation (i.e., finding accessible routes) and maneuvering tasks (i.e., parking wheelchair in confined spaces). These scenarios demand substantial effort and pose safety and anxiety risks for people with physical disabilities adversely affecting their quality of life.

Across the nation, behavioral health concerns for youth are on the rise. In this context, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) youth experience behavioral health disparities at some of the highest rates in the United States. Even as behavioral health services are becoming more available through mobile health and telehealth interventions, the lack of ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connectivity in rural tribal communities prevents many AIAN youths from accessing these critical services.