Pilot activities in Monza, Italy
Start date: January 2020
End date: April 2020
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, pilot site activities have been seriously slowed down: installations and face-to-face support were affected during the lockdown phase. Nevertheless, the NESTORE users benefitted from the remote support of the NESTORE team and the visit restrictions allowed a more extensive pre-testing of the system in labs, at all benefit for the final testers.
Location: Monza and surroundings, Italy
Pilot organiser: La Meridiana (cooplameridiana.it)
Contact persons:
- Alberto Attanasio - alberto.attanasio@cooplameriana.it or phone: (+39) 348/3701455
- Marco Fumagalli - marco.fumagalli@cooplameriana.it or phone: (+39) 345/5869323
- Alessandra Ravasio - alessandra.ravasio@cooplameriana.it or phone: (+39) 366/8198749
Because La Meridiana works for the older people’s well-being, the organization is in continuous contact with family members, friends and community networks to develop their integral service which place them as an ideal partner to lead the NESTORE pilot activities in Italy. They have already run information campaigns since June 2019 to recruit participants.
Read more about La Meridiana's pilot activities in Italian
Before the pilot, La Meridiana ran co-design activities
Activities with potential end users started in Italy in February 2018. La Meridiana facilitated several activities in which 21 participants got involved to share their views, preferences and needs regarding the use of technologies in daily life (using the ‘Exhibition in a Box’ methodology). Four co-design activities were also organized to collect opinions and experiences on prototype use in order to improve the NESTORE system. In concrete, Italian users were recruited to test the wearables and the tangible coach.
Read more about the co-design activities in NESTORE
Amidst various lockdowns and restriction of various entities, La Meridiana kept on implementing the pilot activities until January 2020.
After the first phase of selection and visits concluded, the pilot period began in September 2020, when in-person visits concluded, and devices could be installed and tested live. Despite the COVID-19 pandemics limiting socialization and physical meetings, La Meridiana continued supporting its users online and with ad hoc visits when possible.
In January 2021, specialist visits and final evaluations were performed in-person.
Although the experience with NESTORE ended, La Meridiana wishes to get together with its users as soon as the sanitary situation will allow, so to exchange and collect experience besides the methodological framework.