A cheerful piece of DG Cities news for our final blog of the year: a welcome to the newest member of our team, Sam Grounds, our IoT Project Manager. Sam joined us on a placement as a graduate trainee and liked it so much he decided to stay. He’s brought some great skills to the team, and has already been getting stuck into a range of projects, from a smart homes initiative to improve housing maintenance, to the trialling of IoT cameras to reduce antisocial behaviour.

It’s exciting to have joined the DG Cities team full-time as IoT (Internet of Things) Project Manager. Having been seconded to the company for six months as part the graduate programme at the Royal Borough of Greenwich, I had the chance to experience the innovative and exciting world of DG Cities before I joined. One of the things I appreciated from the start was the chance to work with this talented team of specialists with backgrounds in such a wide variety of sectors.

My academic background is in geography. I studied this at the University of Manchester, with a year studying abroad in the USA at the University of Vermont. My focus was human geography, which introduced me to the themes around urban development, innovation, energy, health and IoT that are at the heart of what I’m working on now.

After university, I lived in Australia for two years, travelling and working before returning home to start the Local Government Association’s National Graduate Development Programme, based in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. My initial role was in Children’s Services, then I moved to DG Cities for my second placement – and haven’t looked back! Already, I have worked on a variety of projects, including decarbonisation, fly-tipping monitoring and energy reduction initiatives.

At the end of October, I joined DG Cities full time as IoT Project Manager. My focus is continuing to develop our IoT programme, and there are a few exciting projects in this area coming up. The first is a partnership with Sense, a household energy monitoring device that uses AI and machine learning to monitor the electricity consumption of appliances in the home. The pilot project will involve the installation of Sense devices in 40 council owned homes across the Royal Borough of Greenwich, as well as carefully developed behavioural interventions. The behavioural science aspect to projects at DG Cities is full of new experiences and lessons for me; I’m excited by the potential of behaviour change and technology interventions to work together – this behavioural aspect has added an interesting new layer to some of the projects I have been working on.

Smart Homes is another project we are delivering, in partnership with the Royal Borough of Greenwich, where we are planning to install environmental sensors and Smart Fire Detection Systems in 160 council-owned properties. This will involve incorporating IoT systems in housing, focusing on properties with damp and mould issues, sheltered accommodation, large multiple-dwellings units, and void properties. The aim of the project is to find effective ways of using technology to monitor conditions in social housing, to get ahead of any potential issues and improve the response to damp and mould in homes. These projects are particularly exciting as I believe they can make a difference in the context of the cost-of-living crisis and rising energy costs; we are implementing exciting potential solutions that are relevant to the real issues people are facing today.

It’s been an exciting few months, and I can’t wait to see what next year at DG Cities brings. It’s a great team, and I’m looking forward to continuing to learn and develop alongside colleagues with such a breadth of experience. I’m also proud to be a part of a company that is putting the opinions and needs of service users at the heart of what they do, to advance the innovative, technology-led solutions that can make a real, positive difference to people’s lives.