The iMARS vision aims to revolutionize emergency services by harnessing AI, robotics, IoT, and cross-disciplinary expertise. This research program facilitates collaboration among three first responders, an industrial SME, and four research institutions, fostering the exchange of knowledge and personnel across sectors and borders. Its core impact lies in promoting a holistic problem-solving approach and practical innovation in emergency response through: 1. Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Leveraging diverse fields to create solutions surpassing the limitations of individual disciplines. 2. Knowledge Exchange and Mobility: Offering secondments to blend academic and industrial insights, ensuring real-world applicability of research. 3. Professional Development: Providing training to develop a skilled workforce ready to deploy advanced technologies in emergencies. 4. Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Cultivating an environment where innovation flourishes, potentially sparking new ventures focused on emergency services. 5. Sector Interaction: Ensuring direct involvement of end-users, from first responders to industry experts, guarantees that developments are user-centric and actionable. 6. Technological Advancements: iMARS addresses the full technology spectrum, from data acquisition to advanced communication, aiming for comprehensive enhancements in emergency operations. 7. Humanitarian Focus: Prioritizing the use of robotics in search and rescue to improve outcomes for society reflects the project’s commitment to humanitarian values. iMARS stands to redefine emergency service provision, making it more robust and efficient. By aligning cutting-edge technology with strategic collaboration, iMARS sets the stage for global advancements in emergency management and could become a benchmark for international cooperative innovation.

Multiuser immersive experiences can provide an opportunity to leverage health results and quality of life in smart ageing care environments.Virtual Reality (VR) current approaches for the Silver Economy follow a common pattern:the gamified experience.VR2Care breaks the current VR paradigm in smart living environments by enabling a multi-user mixed reality service, available for embodied exercising group in different physical locations at the same time and with expert exercise supervision.Motivation is empowered in VR2Care by a social commitment. A social experience of several people sharing difficulties and fighting isolation, replaces the “the patient/user and the application” paradigm, and the gamified entertainment experiences. VR2Care goes beyond the common requirements as it is codesigned with active participation of older adults, caregivers, therapists, community and clinicians to provide a full immersive multiuser experience.VR2Care will leverage the technology by running four demonstrators that support the project pilots in three locations across the EU:Portugal,Netherlands and Italy.Demonstrators explore the multiuser capabilities of the environment in a distance psychomotricity training with large movements; multimodal natural interaction, with real time AI supported guidance for a one-to-one physical rehabilitation experience; an hybrid approach with a local group of older adults and a distance individuals performing physical activities; and a clinical approach for the promotion of exercise as a therapy after rehabilitation.From a business perspective,VR2Care opens up a global market to deliver services and products to customers, where distances between provider and customer disappear.Business opportunities go beyond the technological and technical companies, expanding challenges for the AAL ecosystem including companies such as broadcasters, architects, therapists, training and education institutions to deliver at any place trainings, advices and design.

One out of every three bites of food we eat is there because of pollinators. However, pollinator and especially bee diversity has declined markedly in Europe and a study from 2014 by the university of Reading calculates the existing shortage at seven billion bees. In addition to the challenges from climate change and an ever growing world population the agricultural sector is under tremendous pressure to produce a lot more crop on limited acres and a declining pollinator population. Hivepoll aims to establish a novel data exchange platform between beekeepers and other stakeholder in the agriculture market. The project will not only offer a low-cost visual computing system to detect threats and effectively manage bee hives in real time but also unprecedented insights into the performance of bee colonies as pollinators. Hivepoll allows to predict crop yield and using better models to manage crop failure risks, two features which are among the biggest opportunities for Big Data applications in agriculture. With hivepoll it will become possible to provide an early warning system in case of a low pollination performance as well as being able to counter these adverse effects. Furthermore, an effective parasite detection will contribute to the health of bee colonies and their survival in good health over the winter which is a prime concern of bee keepers and farmers as honey bees are among the few pollinators which are active in sufficient force early in the planting cycle. A fast pollination of crops is extremely important as it alleviates the negative effects of unstable weather conditions such as spring frost. We predict an up to 10% increase in crop yield due to the improved management of pollination by hivepoll. Hivepoll is based on a successfully concluded 2 years research project with universities. In the project important follow-up steps for commercialization will be carried out.