CityCare: Crowdsourcing daily life issue reports in smart cities

The various problems regularly encountered in urban residential environments can have significant impact on citizen's quality of life, while simultaneously their identification, reporting and management by the responsible authorities entail a very demanding process. Providing citizens with mobile applications for participatory reporting (i.e. crowdsourcing) of problems may help streamline the work of relevant municipal services; such citizen-centric services will make the city smarter through enhanced problem management and request processing. In this article, we introduce two new mobile applications, CityCare and CityCareW, which are complementary with respect to each other and cover all phases of a problem report lifecycle. They incorporate innovative mechanisms that allow the detection of the most critical problems, as well as duplicate problem reports while gamification mechanisms are applied to motivate citizen participation. Trial evaluations have shown that the two applications are user-friendly and satisfy their end-users to a very considerable extent.