Edmonton's Community Safety & Well-Being Strategy tracks seven pillars across the city — Anti-Racism, Reconciliation, Safe & Inclusive Spaces, Pathways Out of Poverty, Well-Being, Crime Prevention, and Equitable Policies. PULSE takes those same signals — plus EPS Community Safety data, 311 service requests, needle-collection records, and 2016 Federal Census — and fuses them into a Social Isolation Index per neighbourhood, with three agency-specific composite indices and the Invisible Cohort flagship signal.
"The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. Loneliness kills. It's as powerful as smoking or alcoholism."— Robert Waldinger · Harvard Study of Adult Development (75 years, 724 lives)
PULSE applies SCADA architecture — the same pattern used for decades in industrial plants and power grids — to the civic data Edmonton already publishes. Dozens of gauges, one operator view, automated alerts when a reading drifts.
The Social Isolation Index weights four categories: concentrated distress (needle calls, well-being checks), demographic risk (seniors living alone, low-density youth), engagement silence (declining 311 activity year-over-year), and mobility friction (transit-stop proximity, accessible-path data).
Each signal is normalized against Edmonton's 392 neighbourhoods. A score of 70+ triggers an alert routed to the appropriate service — public health, recreation, housing. No guessing. No annual survey. A gauge on a wall.
Edmonton's Community Safety & Well-Being (CSWB) Strategy is a Council-endorsed framework built on seven pillars. Its public dashboard reports city-wide indicators each quarter. PULSE doesn't duplicate that work — PULSE brings the same signals down to the neighbourhood level, fuses them into a single index, and routes alerts to the agency partners who can act on them. Where CSWB tells Council how Edmonton is doing, PULSE tells a community worker where to go this week.
PULSE is only as honest as its sources. The four signals driving the current SII (311 calls, needle-collection requests, age demographics, transit proximity) are all genuine public endpoints. Every number refreshing on this page came from data.edmonton.ca. But loneliness leaves traces in other places too — places the city has the data but hasn't made it neighbourhood-queryable. We list them openly because the gap is the roadmap.