
Smart Your Home comes to an end
- On 30/06/2021
In the context of activities related to adult education, which see Eurocrea Merchant at the centre of many project initiatives under the Erasmus+ Programme, a special mention is given to “Smart Your Home”, which these days is heading towards the epilogue after almost three years of work.
Led by the German Research Institute ILI, a branch of the University of Nuremberg, and strengthened by a partnership including as well the University of Dublin, the CETEM Technology Centre in Murcia and the Regional Agency for Territorial Development of North Romania-Est, Smart Your Home has implemented a series of initiatives aimed at promoting home automation among people in the so-called senior age group. The stated objective – and true pillar of the project activity, was the creation of a gradual training path, to bring this category of people to the applications of digital technologies and allow them to maintain a good level of autonomy at home. Thanks to increasingly advanced and increasingly easy to use devices, organizing your smart home means in fact prolonging your stay at home even when age begins to make it more complicated.
The Smart Your Home project has therefore perfectly combined the themes of digital education with those of welfare for the elderly! Let’s see how: once the needs analysis at the level of each individual territory involved has been completed, the partners have started to work on the definition of the contents of a theoretical and practical course, able to intrigue the senior and attract them little by little towards a technological universe on average not congenial for that age, but rich in interesting solutions and practically within reach of everyone, even from an economic point of view. The course, articulated in teaching modules of increasing difficulty, was conceived as an entirely online activity due to the pandemic, but presents content easily transferable in a more traditional classroom logic. And to test its effectiveness, in the last quarter all the partners have carried out a pilot activity involving in every territory about twenty seniors who studied and practiced with the assistance of online tutors, taking advantage of the digital platform made available by the German coordinator ILI.
The results of the pilot phase, although still under evaluation, are absolutely encouraging and once again confirm that the issues related to digital technologies, if properly managed, can be extended and bring great benefits even outside the circle of so-called digital natives. Besides, an important added value came to the testing activities through the starter kit for smart home that any participant received for free at the beginning of the course. It allowed to practically handle and start using the most common devices, including a voice assistant that integrate perfectly with the main systems of home automation and showed how easy it is to control Smart devices at home.
Once the project is completed, the course carried out within Smart Your Home will enter the full availability of the entire scientific community and the European social body, adding yet another piece of the Erasmus+ Programme to the construction of a more advanced and supportive Europe.