Hohhot – capital city of North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region – is advancing its development as a smart city, with a major project called the Hohhot City Brain currently in full swing, according to local media reports.

The city began its transformation into a smart city in October 2020 and the Hohhot City Brain officially launched on Jan 20 this year, marking the first "city-level" metropolitan brain in the autonomous region.

The Hohhot City Brain is composed of a so-called city brain intelligence center and four basic support systems for perception, data, security and the Aiqingcheng app, as well as various applications generated from it.

According to reports, the city brain has to date created (check) 20 categories and 117 sub-layer overlays, with more than 4,000 sensing devices having been deployed.

Currently, there are 190,000 manhole covers across the city.

City departments have successively installed sensors at each manhole cover and various information is coded as displayed from it.

As soon as a manhole cover becomes loose, the system sends out an alarm and staff deal with the problem promptly and eliminate any danger.

Through historical data, it is also possible to analyze the use and status of the road where the manhole cover is located, the flows of people and vehicles and the quality of the project.

Moving forwards, plans are for the city to accelerate improvements to the smart applications pilots. Hohhot will continue to develop applications functions, fine-tune applications efficiency and develop an efficient and comprehensive model that can be replicated and promoted.