Digital solutions for rural areas – addressing challenges

As the AURORAL project is aiming at building an interoperable middleware architecture to connect and replicate services in remote regions around Europe, a thorough research has been made on which services already exist in the following identified Smart Communities domains: Smart Health, Smart Farming, Smart energy, Smart Logistics and Mobility, Smart Tourism, Smart Governance, Smart Industry.

Whereas many example and best practices have been found in the Smart Mobility and Smart Tourism domains, and they are well covered by the AURORAL consortium, there are still many gaps to be addressed.

Main findings show that rural areas could greatly benefit from services based on IoT technologies and AI, but the potential of the exchange, process and analysis of big data acquired through sensors and drones is still to be exploited and discovered in the domains.

Another specific domain full of potential opportunities to be leveraged with the use of digital technology and the processing of big data is Smart Energy, especially in terms of integration with other services, and how data coming from energy flows could serve to improve conditions and quality in other domains.

This workshop will first present findings, innovation and knowledge gaps from the umbrella review that has been conducted for the submission of the Report on AURORAL innovation gaps, as part of the project´s deliverables.

The event will then summarize the results of the first workshop, where general recommendations and best practices to tackle rural areas digitalisation challenges were presented. Then, companies developing and delivering digital services that could benefit from the AURORAL middleware will present their approach, to inspire, share knowledge and allow the consortium to fine-tune the scope of the open calls that will be launched later this year to tackle the identified gaps.

In summary, the workshop will consist in four parts: