A new Digital Era for rural areas

There are several overarching reasons why people remain offline or with slow connectivity speeds, with main reasons being lack of network infrastructure availability and affordable Internet services. Additionally, reasons may reside in gaps in digital skills, cost of personal devices, and a perceived lack of relevancy.

XGain was developed to support the design and development of programs and interventions that address two of these main issues:

• lack of Internet infrastructure availability in certain areas;

• high connectivity service prices that make Internet connectivity unaffordable for rural populations.

Based on real-life, real-needs in real-time, XGain will deploy, explore and assess digital connectivity options by applying a range of technological solutions to a wide spectrum of geographical locations and sectors. More specifically,

• In Mora La Nova - Spain, a set of 5G-Connected drones (airborne and ground-borne) will be deployed in order to facilitate services such as monitoring. XGain will demonstrate the capacity of drones to identify crop needs (e.g., watering, fertilization, pest control) and prevent natural disasters such as wildfires via real-time surveillance.

• In Central Macedonia – Greece, eHealth robots will act as a companion/caregiver in order to provide health and wellbeing guidance and interventions for elderly people living in rural areas.

• In the isles of Scilly – UK, balloons and drones will be used in order to provide 5G adequate and extended coverage.

• In Lithuania, hybrid solutions - local via drones or local servers and cloud-based will be used for precision agriculture and environmental monitoring and control.

• In Dalmatia – Croatia, XGain will offer its connectivity solutions to the oyster farming industry by applying a satellite IoT network in order to overcome the fragmented existing network and provide fast and reliable data transfer and analytics.

• In Flanders – Belgium, XGain will deploy a “digital shepherd” in livestock farming via camera instalments and drones for real-time data acquisition and monitoring.

XGain’s platform is intended to provide the best digital connectivity solutions to all stakeholders in an ad-hoc way by answering all of their questions and hesitations.

XGain’s primary objective, by the end of this project, is to establish an EU network, able to endure in time. Led by a team of experts from the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), XGain will be the meeting point for all related stakeholders, from farmers to local governments, to achieve this goal. XGain is looking forward to bringing a meaningful change in rural areas of Europe and taking you with us along this journey.