# A Comprehensive Study of the Use of LoRa in the Development of Smart Cities
## 5 Discussion
### Impact of LoRa Research Proposals in the Smart City Initiative
Research focused on the use of LoRa and prompting the use of LoRa brings problems to the generation of a circular economy that adopts smart cities in order to obtain sustainability. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c} \hline \hline  & **Loose Integration** & **Tight Integration** & **Data** \\ \hline Agriculture and Farming & 2.7 & 1.6 & 3.8 \\ Energy & 0.6 & 2.5 & 0.0 \\ Environment & 0.6 & 0.3 & 0.1 \\ Healthcare & 2.8 & 1.6 & 0.5 \\ Industry & 0.5 & 0.2 & 0.1 \\ Transportation & 0.2 & 1.9 & 0.1 \\ Waste Management & 0.5 & 1.2 & 0.0 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 17: Chi Square, between smart city subcategory, and three hypotheses. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c} \hline \hline  & **Social** & **Economic** & **Organizational** & **Material Reuse** \\ \hline Agriculture and Farming & 3 & 1 & 7 & 2 \\ Energy & 1 & 4 & 2 & 3 \\ Environment & 16 & 2 & 4 & 1 \\ Healthcare & 7 & 0 & 4 & 2 \\ Industry & 0 & 7 & 3 & 3 \\ Transportation & 4 & 1 & 6 & 0 \\ Waste Management & 4 & 0 & 2 & 7 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 18: Impact of IoT-LoRa proposals on circular economy of smart cities. The qualitative analysis carried out of scientific proposals developed from 2015 to 2019 indicates that such works were designed to cover specific needs in the subcategories of agriculture and farming, energy, environment, healthcare, industry, traffic, waste management, which were defined in the \"Materials and Methods\" subsection of this study. The research proposals covered areas considered as critical (or key factors) in a circular economy, such as energy, mobility, environment, and communications, according to the \"Circular economy strategies in eight historic port cities: criteria and indicators towards an evaluation framework for circular cities\" [2] and \"The socio-economic integration of the circular economy are considered: An Integrative Framework\" [97]. The result of the analysis presented in the subsection called \"Research Impact Contribution\" show that most of the proposals delivered solutions for the energy, environmental, and transportation fields. In those works, the \"communications\" feature was just considered in an indirect way. For example, these works just considered basic features, such as the delivery of information gathered from the components of the IoT ecosystem to the user. LoRa-based proposals should also cover areas that are considered critical within the approach of a circular economy. For example, the works should consider the recycling or reuse aspects on which the circular economy is based to generate sustainability. LoRa-based proposals make use of infrastructures or processes previously established in different fields such as health, agriculture, and energy. Based on this fact, the reuse of the elements is focused on incorporating IoT elements in these infrastructures to contribute with intelligence, as mentioned in the subsection \"Research Impact Contribution\". The objective of obtaining data is to generate intelligence for improving decision-making processes. LoRa is an open standard. This feature allows IoT-LoRa solutions to adapt their technical and functional requirements according to smart city' needs, as mentioned in the subsection \"Analysis of the Application Layer\" of this work. LoRa devices can be re-used to improve functionalities for smart city applications by just adding some libraries or configurations. This adaptability or flexibility of LoRa identified in the \"SWOT Analysis\" subsection contributes significantly to the idea of circular economy in the smart city.