Kenshi Environmental Monitoring System [LONG]

Whitepaper/Proposal: Kenshi Environmental Monitoring System (KEMS)

TL;DR: IoT Environment Data > Kenshi > Valuable > Business Incentive > Moral Incentive.

Hello,

While day dreaming in the office today instead of doing the work I’m supposed to be doing, I thought about projects with real-world use cases that could be built on Kenshi and be 1) Profitable and 2) Provide real-world value. This is what I have come up with so far:

The KNS Environmental Monitoring System

Imagine a National network of IoT sensors capturing useful environmental data like CO2 emissions (And other emissions), air quality, water quality, soil quality, temperature, etc.

Why is this useful?

Data is useful. And this sort of data would be extremely valuable to a lot of industries, as well as to government. For businesses that want to improve their branding or reputation as environmentally conscious and proactive, participating in such a network in a meaningful way - Having their environmental impact data collected and collated in a valuable and tamper-proof way would be the ultimate commitment to saying “Yes, we want to improve on this and do our bit”. Data is useful because you can learn from it. Identify inefficiencies and inconsistencies, analyse and learn from them. And then implement improvements to increase your efficiency rating.

Initially, the incentive for business’ to participate in such a program would be low. “The general public will see just how high our CO2 emissions are”, “Our competition might be able to utilize this data in order to gain insight into our business resource usage…” And probably a lot more reasons I can’t think of right now.

But, the incentive would still be there. Environmental Organizations could start the trend, eventually it would be a domino effect. You’re either participating in the network, or you’re the company or industry to get scrutinized under the microscope because you clearly feel the need to hide the data that shows how toxic you are to the environment.

Government regulation is also moving towards making access to such data mandatory. This sort of data would be worth billions of dollars per year. And Kenshi’s Indexing, Oracle, and IoT capabilities are practically a match made in heaven for such a system.

Additionally, such a system could only be reputable if it was built on a platform like Kenshi. Why? Because the alternative is IoT devices reporting to a closed and inscrutable system of private servers and databases, that could easily be tampered with, making the data unreliable - and therefore practically worthless.

Whereas an Environmental Monitoring System built on Kenshi would have the confidence that comes from the backing and verification provided by a decentralized blockchain.

The beauty of it is, users around the globe would be incentivized to participate and contribute to the building up of the infrastructure to parse all this data with the incentive of being rewarded in KNS tokens - Not to mention the potential for this data to provide enormous value to the KNS token as a result of being incredibly valuable, oracle verified data.

Anyway, that’s a fun hypothetical I came up with. Who wants to help me build this? Who wants to chime in with additional ideas? Criticism? Concerns? Questions?

I (think I) have some idea of where to begin, and that’s by getting a few sensors talking to Kenshi and being validated on-chain. I guess figuring out the Oracle part and the IoT SDK will be important early first steps too.

3 Likes

Also, I don’t know how valuable this sort of data is. I know its valuable, but “billions of dollars a year” is just a random figure I pulled out of my hat.

PS: This is mostly intended as a fun hypothetical, but if we build it that would be pretty cool too.

2 Likes

Kenshi Environmental Monitoring System (KEMS) Whitepaper v0.1

There’s a whole bunch of BS in here FWIW. I’ve read through it a couple times and need to make a lot of edits and flesh out a lot of shit, as well as actually work out better numbers for data usage and how many IoT devices would be realistically required, and what kind, etc… Also, blatantly ripped segments from the Kenshi website because this project is being built on KNS and the easiest way to explain KNS is to basically summarize their documentation in snippets all over the place. This is necessary to contextualize that KEMS is a project being built using the Kenshi platform, and is not a new token or anything dumb like that.

I also have no idea what I’m doing and am not quite sure if the proposal is fully possible within the current and future design constraints of the Kenshi blockchain. But, I think it is possible.

I’ll fix that eventually… Just wanted to get something out there to keep this ball rolling.

Anyways, at the end of the day this is just a bit of fun.

Also, sorry I didn’t think to link to Kenshi’s website or reference it as a source. I’ll re-upload later with that adjustment made.

2 Likes

I’m told energy companies find this kind of data valuable. Also, big pharma companies that need to monitor the environmental factors of the containers in which they ship their medicine.

This is a very interesting topic. I think we can cover this:

  1. Our IoT devkit prototype supports secure key management for signing sensor data, and it also comes with a few environmental sensors.
  2. Handling TB of data is not a problem. Unchained supports data sharding.
  3. Regarding the “green” part, imagine a system that triggers a “plant a tree” API.

This kind of environmental data can also be used to predict weather patterns, forest fires, etc. It’s super useful for insurance, too.

2 Likes

The incentives continue to build up! :slight_smile:

I’m told energy companies find this kind of data valuable. Also, big pharma companies that need to monitor the environmental factors of the containers in which they ship their medicine.

Yeah, a lot of use cases actually. I compiled a list and continued working on the idea and will update the whitepaper sometime in the future (Eventually). It’s a bit too ambitious for me to actually build, but fun to try as a Proof of Concept. I don’t have any IoT sensors laying around, but used Python to simulate a temperature sensor:

import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt
import random
import time
import json

# MQTT broker details
broker_address = "broker.hivemq.com"  # Public broker for testing
port = 1883
topic_temp = "kems/temperature"
topic_humidity = "kems/humidity"

# Create MQTT client and connect to the broker
client = mqtt.Client("KEMS_Virtual_Sensor")
client.connect(broker_address, port)

def generate_sensor_data():
    temp = round(random.uniform(15, 30), 2)
    humidity = round(random.uniform(30, 90), 2)
    return temp, humidity

while True:
    # Simulate temperature and humidity
    temperature, humidity = generate_sensor_data()

    # Publish data
    client.publish(topic_temp, temperature)
    client.publish(topic_humidity, humidity)

    # Print data to console (for debugging)
    print(f"Published: Temperature = {temperature} C, Humidity = {humidity} %")

    # Wait before sending next data
    time.sleep(5)  # Sends data every 5 seconds

I tried to send the simulated IoT temperature data to Kenshi Deep Index, but ran into some errors. I connected a new test wallet on Arbitrum Goerli to the Deep Index Sync Dashboard and went to create a task, but I think I need to deploy a smart contract and probably a whole other bunch of stuff that’s over my head.

Oh well, it was fun to flesh out as an idea. Miiiight keep playing with this on and off in the weeks ahead. Is sending data to Deep Index possible to do for free on Arbitrium Goerli (Will it accept test Arb as payment?)

2 Likes

Kenshi Deep Index only indexes blockchain events. Kenshi Oracle network publishes data to the blockchain. Together they’re the “pull-push” of the ecosystem. What you’re describing is more suitable for Unchained once we hit a stable API.

2 Likes