Christina Karamperi

As European cities transition to climate-neutral and smart mobility, ensuring these changes are inclusive, equitable, and safe for all users is crucial. This paper presents insights from the ELABORATOR Horizon Europe project in Trikala, where local stakeholders co-design sustainable mobility solutions. The research focuses on gendered urban and peri-urban travel, showing how care responsibilities, rural-urban divides, and safety concerns shape women’s mobility choices and access to sustainable modes. Although Trikala offers strong potential for active travel and digital mobility, current systems overlook the complexity of women’s routines. To address this, Trikala implements smart, data-driven interventions with a gender-inclusive focus. These include smart pedestrian crossings near schools, sensors on cycling lanes to detect illegal parking and obstruction, and a mobility app enabling multimodal, low-emission journey planning. The interventions combine real-time data, sensor networks, and participatory evidence to prioritise safety and accessibility. Complementing this is a series of participatory workshops identifying mobility barriers for women, caregivers, and older adults. Ultimately, this work advances inclusive urban transitions by embedding gender equity and transport safety into Trikala’s mobility planning, while contributing to scalable European mobility policies.

Indoor environments are the dominant setting for human exposure to respiratory viruses, yet routine molecular surveillance of indoor air remains rare outside single-site studies. Within the Horizon Europe TwinAIR project, a single harmonised workflow was applied to 102 indoor air samples (2000 L each) collected between October 2024 and February 2026 at ten pilot settings in Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Greece and Sweden, covering university teaching rooms, school classrooms and staff rooms, healthcare-associated offices, workplace offices, an elderly care facility and public transport vehicles. Air was collected onto gelatine membrane filters with a Sartorius MD8 Airport sampler, total nucleic acid was extracted with the QIAamp Viral RNA Mini kit, and five targets—SARS-CoV-2, human adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus A/B, influenza A and rhinovirus—were quantified against target-specific standard curves as genome copies per cubic metre (GC/m³). At least one target was detected in 84 of 102 samples (82.4%; 95% CI 73.8–88.5). SARS-CoV-2 was the most frequent and most abundant target (64.7%; up to 8.36 × 10⁶ GC/m³) and adenovirus was the second most frequent though consistently low in concentration (33.3%); both were recovered from all six countries. Rhinovirus (14.7%, five countries), RSV A/B (8.8%, four) and influenza A (6.9%, four) were detected less often yet reached high concentrations when present, showing that detection frequency alone substantially understates airborne viral burden. Detection of viral genome does not establish infectivity.

This paper presents “DESMOS”, a novel ecosystem for the interconnection of smart infrastructures, mobile and wearable devices, and applications, to provide a secure environment for visitors and tourists. The presented solution brings together state-of-the-art IoT technologies, crowdsourcing, localization through BLE, and semantic reasoning, following a privacy and security-by-design approach to ensure data anonymization and protection. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the solution was tested, validated, and evaluated via two pilots in almost real settings—involving a fewer density of people than planned—in Trikala, Thessaly, Greece. The results and findings support that the presented solutions can provide successful emergency reporting, crowdsourcing, and localization via BLE. However, these results also prompt for improvements in the user interface expressiveness, the application’s effectiveness and accuracy, as well as evaluation in real, overcrowded conditions. The main contribution of this paper is to report on the progress made and to showcase how all these technological solutions can be integrated and applied in realistic and practical scenarios, for the safety and privacy of visitors and tourists.