Empowering Urban Communities for Safer Roads through the Internet of Things - One Country at a Time

A regional research collaboration led by Sunway University has recently reached a key milestone with the successful completion of an on-road trial and technical workshop in Bandung, Indonesia. The project focuses on advancing affordable and scalable urban road health monitoring solutions to empower urban communities.

The activities were hosted by the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). The workshop brought together researchers and industry practitioners to validate low-cost road monitoring technologies against internationally recognised benchmarks.

The core activity involved on-road trials across selected routes in Bandung city to validate Class 3 road roughness measurement approaches using smartphone applications and IoT-based devices against Class 1 laser profilers, the gold standard for International Roughness Index (IRI) measurement.

The smartphone-based application was developed by Sunway University, while the microcontroller-based IoT device was developed by the Cambodia Academy of Digital Technology (CADT). By directly comparing measurements under real driving conditions, the trials demonstrated the potential of affordable platforms to generate reliable road condition data with significantly lower cost and operational complexity.

Beyond technical testing, the visit enabled in-depth discussions on differences in road monitoring practices and standards across Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam. These exchanges highlighted variations in governance structures, data coverage, maintenance workflows and instrumentation availability, which are critical for deploying scalable solutions in diverse urban contexts.
An industry partner from Indonesia, PT. Nusa Antara Jayatama, contributed practical insights into current road monitoring practices in Indonesia and also the use of Class 1 instruments for benchmarking against the prototypes developed by the team during the field trials. Their input provided valuable feedback for refining the validation framework and strengthening the relevance of the developed solutions.

The project aligns with the Future Cities Research Institute (FCRI) theme, a joint research partnership between Sunway University and Lancaster University, which advances data-driven and scalable infrastructure solutions to support safer and more affordable cities across Southeast Asia. By integrating Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and crowdsensing approaches, the platform supports a shift from reactive to predictive road maintenance, improving safety, reducing long-term costs and enhancing overall urban liveability.

The international project is led by Dr Hadyan Hafizh from the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Sunway University and funded by ASEAN-IVO. The project with multi-country partnership consists of researchers from Indonesia (ITB), Cambodia (CADT) and Vietnam Myanmar (University of Computer Studies Yangon).  Under his leadership, the initiative aims to translate advanced research into practical, regionally relevant solutions that enhance road safety, improve infrastructure resilience and enable more affordable urban mobility - one country at a time.