IoT Västra Götaland - a shared IoT platform for over 100 public organisations

Background

A municipality that wants to use connected sensors for water, buildings, roads or care faces the same overhead whatever its size: a procurement, a platform, integrations, a security review, and the competence to operate all of it. For a small municipality that overhead is larger than the benefit of any single application, so nothing gets started.

IoT-samverkan Västra Götaland removes the barrier by making the infrastructure regional. Västra Götalandsregionen procures and coordinates one shared, horizontal IoT platform, and municipalities, municipal companies and municipal associations connect to it instead of building their own. Around 140 organisations (municipalities, municipal companies, municipal associations and VGR’s own operations) have registered their interest, 136 took part in the coordinated procurement, and more than 100 participate in the collaboration today.

Eleven organisations have signed

Participation runs from following the work to a binding commitment. Eleven organisations have signed the collaboration agreement: Falköpings kommun and Vara kommun joined during 2026, alongside Lidköping, Tidaholm, Orust, Ulricehamn, Tranemo, Tibro, Skara, Trollhättans stad and Västra Götalandsregionen itself.

That number matters more than the headline one. Each signature is an organisation moving from evaluating shared infrastructure to actually operating on it. And because the infrastructure is shared, each one that joins inherits the integrations and applications the others have already built.

What it is used for

The applications in production are deliberately unglamorous: demand-driven emptying of mailboxes, bathing water temperature in lakes, visitor presence in libraries, soil moisture measurement, and temperature monitoring in medicine cabinets. Eighteen applications are catalogued in total.

This is precisely what shared infrastructure is for. Not one of those cases would justify its own platform procurement; together, on one platform, each becomes a small and cheap addition to something that already exists.

How the collaboration is run

The collaboration is organised rather than ad hoc. A steering group sets direction and mandate, a regional coordinator keeps the participating organisations aligned, and thematic competence groups and collaboration forums carry the practical work, among them data-driven property management, camera technology and edge AI, and connectivity.

The delivery itself is governed by a two-level collaboration model agreed in the procurement: an operational forum that meets eleven times a year on service delivery, incidents and day-to-day quality, and a tactical forum that meets at least annually on contractual matters, volumes, architecture changes and risk.

Sensative and Yggio

The region signed the platform agreement with Sensative in 2024, and planning of testing and implementation began immediately, with a digital kick-off held on 18 December 2024. Magnus Renck Holmes is the region’s coordinator for the collaboration.

Sensative delivers the platform. The requirement it answers is the one Yggio was built for: many organisations, many sensor types from many suppliers, one interoperable operational layer, with each organisation keeping control of its own data rather than handing it to a platform owner.

Sensative also works with Västra Götalandsregionen beyond the platform itself: the region and the City of Stockholm are both partners with Sensative in the EU project RESCUE, bringing resilient edge and AI technology into real operational environments.