Effective EU support to a large external crisis requires new approaches. In response to this challenge and to identified user and market needs from previous projects, Reaching Out proposes an innovative multi-disciplinary approach that will optimize the efforts, address a wide spectrum of users and maximize market innovation success. This approach results in five main objectives: to 1. Develop a Collaborative Framework, with distributed platforms of functional services, 2. Implement a flexible and open “collaborative innovation” process involving users and SMEs, suppliers, operators and research organisations, 3. Develop, upgrade and integrate 78 new connectable and interoperable tools, 4. Conduct 5 large scale demonstrations on the field: o health disaster in Africa (Epidemics in Guinea, with strong social and cultural issues), o natural disaster in a politically complex region and a desert environment (Earthquake in the Jordan Valley, led jointly by Jordan, Israel and Palestine), o three global change disasters in Asia targeted at large evacuation and humanitarian support in Bangladesh (long lasting floods, huge storms and associated epidemics,), EU citizen support and repatriation in Shanghai (floods & storm surge), radiological and industrial disasters impacting EU assets in Taiwan (flash floods, landslides, storm surge and chemical and radiological disasters), supported and co-funded by local authorities, 5. Provide recommendations and evaluations for future legal and policy innovations. The project will be conducted under the supervision of senior end-users. It will be performed with flexible and proven procedures by a balanced consortium of users, industry, innovative SMEs, RTO and academia in the EU and the demonstration regions. The main expected impact is to improve external disaster and crisis management efficiency and cost-benefit and increase the EU visibility whilst enhancing EU industry competitiveness and enlarging the market.

The SoundCity Project MONICA aims to provide a very large scale demonstration of multiple existing and new Internet of Things technologies for Smarter Living. The solution will be deployed in 6 major cities in Europe. MONICA demonstrates a large scale IoT ecosystem that uses innovative wearable and portable IoT sensors and actuators with closed-loop back-end services integrated into an interoperable, cloud-based platform capable of offering a multitude of simultaneous, targeted applications. All ecosystems will be demonstrated in the scope of large scale city events, but have general applicability for dynamically deploying Smart City applications in many fixed locations such as airports, main traffic arterials, and construction sites. Moreover, it is inherent in the MONICA approach to identify the official standardisation potential areas in all stages of the project. MONICA will demonstrate an IoT platform in massive scale operating conditions; capable of handling at least 10.000 simultaneous real end-users with wearable and portable sensors using existing and emerging technologies (TRL 5-6) and based upon open standards and architectures. It will design, develop and deploy a platform capable of integrating large amounts of heterogeneous, interoperable IoT enabled sensors with different data capabilities (video, audio, data), resource constraints (wearables, Smartphones, Smartwatches), bandwidth (UWB, M2M), costs (professional, consumer), and deployment (wearable, mobile, fixed, airborne) as well as actuators (lights, LED, cameras, alarms, drones, loudspeakers). It will demo end-to-end, closed loop solutions covering everything from devices and middleware with semantic annotations through a multitude of wireless communication channels to cloud based applications and back to actuation networks. Humans-in-the-Loop is demonstrated through integrating Situational Awareness and Decision Support tools for organisers, security staff and sound engineers situation rooms.

The NEXES Research and Innovation Action aims to research, test and validate the promising integration of IP-based communication technologies and interoperability into the next generation emergency services, so that they attain increased effectiveness and performance. Empowered by smartphones with cameras, messaging and internet-based applications connecting to social media, citizens expect emergency services to use the same technologies. However, this is not the case. NEXES innovates the approach to the dynamics between emergency services and citizens, allowing (i) the use of total conversation capabilities in emergencies, including social media, to the benefit of citizens, including those with disability or special needs (ii) the exploitation of improved location information to rapidly and effectively identify and locate the caller and the incident site and (iii) the leverage of Internet-enabled connectivity to enhance interoperability and shared awareness among emergency services, to the benefit of a more secure society. The NEXES Consortium gathers world-class European entities, well experienced in the research and development of innovative solutions for communications and emergency products and solutions. The NEXES Team presents extensive background knowledge and in-house solutions to adapt, test and validate in NEXES’s open Testing Regime and Validation Framework, ensuring solid results are achieved to produce relevant Recommendations and contributions to Europe’s standardisation effort on emergency services. To leverage related dissemination and market exploitation activities, the NEXES System, Apps and its operational benefits are demonstrated in three realistic pilots to end-users and stakeholders. In fact, end-users’ involvement, directly ensured by NEXES Partners and indirectly by invited Advisors, is a key contributor to guarantee NEXES’s operational validity as a reference implementation system for next generation emergency services.