Dubai: A new one-stop online dashboard to be unveiled early next year by Dubai Smart Office will contain a first of its kind online Happiness Meter to gauge Dubai residents moods in live time.
The new meter is part of a major push to build the smartest – and happiest – city in the world, said Dr. Aisha Butti Bin Bishr, Director General of the Smart Dubai Office in her address on the first day of the Knowledge Summit.
“Smart data is the fuel of our smart-city transformation,” said Bin Bishr, flanked by other smart city and futurist illuminaries in a panel on knowledge and smart cities. “We have reached the final stages of the platform [the online dashboard] and we hope to have it up and running by April 2017.”
In partnership with telecom provider du, Dubai Smart Office is working on the dashboard to provide all city services and departments as well as private entities through one electronic online portal to make it easier for users to stay informed about the smart city in which they live.
“We launched the first Happiness Meter in the dashboard that will enable the city’s leadership to track happiness in real time,” she said. “We can go in at any time and in real time and see the levels of happiness across the city.”
Bin Bishr said that tests done through the Happiness Meter show that it is working and when fully up and running, will be a valuable tool.
The meter is extremely simple and uses three smiley faces, each with moods ranging from happy with an upturned smile to a sad face with a downturned mouth.
To share their mood, online dashboard users can simply click on the appropriate face to vote on a particular municipal service or item being used in the Dubai Smart City portal.
In early preliminary use of the meter by 4.26 million online users, Bin Bishr said, 89 per cent people said they were happy.
Data recorded by the Happiness Meter can also be stored and later reviewed to determine at what point each day, week or month were Dubai residents the happiest, she said.
