Smart cities–filled with sensors and connected tech to help solve everything from traffic jams to pollution–have been slow to materialize. But Singapore has come up with a plan to become the world’s first “smart nation.” Every inch of the country will be wired and collecting data to help build better services.

“We are working to ‘dashboard’ the entire nation of Singapore, and to use a range of data to continuously improve how we provide critical services to citizens in areas such as health care, transport, and resources,” says Steve Leonard, the executive deputy chairman of Infocomm Development Authority, Singapore’s national technology arm.

Courtesy Singapore Tourism Board

Various cities are experimenting with smart technology, like Copenhagen, which is testing out dozens of smart streetlights that can save massive amounts of energy. But if Singapore is successful, it will be the first place to fully connect all infrastructure.

“A city does things that are a little bit more narrow,” Leonard says. “There’s smart streetlights, smart traffic light management or smart waste collection, and those are are great things, but we believe that at a national level we could and should be doing much more.”

Singapore already collects a wide range of data about systems like transportation; the country even knows where individual cars travel, through in-car devices that are also used for paying tolls on certain streets. But they hope to understand even more about how the country’s infrastructure works, and how the systems work together.

“The important thing is not to let that data be in a silo,” says Leonard. “We’re trying to think about how to mesh data from different sources to tackle some of these big problems of the future, such as urban density and aging population.”

Transport data, for example, could be used with health data to figure out how self-driving cars might soon help take elderly patients to the doctor or hospital.