The project “Spatial Intelligence for Integrated Care of Older Adults in Rural Communities (RAFVINIERT),” proposed by Markus Schaffert, Klaus Böhm, and Pascal Neis, has received a grant commitment totaling 1 million euros from the Carl Zeiss Foundation and will be financially supported for three years (April 1, 2021, through March 31, 2024) as part of the “Transfer” program. During this period, the i3mainz team will work closely with various partners to address the issue of mobility for seniors in rural areas.
In rural regions, the journey to the supermarket, the pharmacy, or a trusted doctor is often a long one. For older adults who wish to lead independent lives in their own homes, this distance is sometimes too great. Moreover, it is no longer just the town centers of structurally weak villages where access issues are becoming more acute. Even in the single-family home neighborhoods of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—which are widespread throughout the countryside—supply bottlenecks are likely to arise in the foreseeable future.
Against this backdrop, researchers at i3mainz, in close collaboration with counties and rural municipalities, are developing innovative tools and solutions to serve these areas and their residents. They will design tools and implementation strategies for small-scale monitoring within the framework of municipal geodata infrastructures. In addition, they will develop accessibility calculations for service facilities that prioritize older adults. This will be achieved, for example, by integrating geodata—which has so far been only marginally considered—on topics such as individual mobility capacity, accessibility, and route safety, as well as through computational approaches based on artificial intelligence.
“Good tools do not necessarily lead to their use. The project team will address this challenge through ongoing communication workshops and an on-site real-world laboratory,” explains project manager Markus Schaffert. “The goal is to continuously discuss potential applications with local decision-makers and to identify development needs early on in a transdisciplinary setting.”
Since September 2019, Markus Schaffert has been working at i3mainz on the user-oriented further development of geodata infrastructures, the geo-digitization of rural areas, and the application of geoinformatics methods for addressing demographic change processes. Partners in the project include the districts of Kaiserslautern and Tirschenreuth, the Rhineland-Palatinate District Council, and FIRU mbH—the Research and Information Society for Technical and Legal Issues in Spatial and Environmental Planning.
About the Carl Zeiss Foundation
The Carl Zeiss Foundation has set itself the goal of creating space for scientific breakthroughs. As a partner in scientific excellence, it supports both basic research and applied research and teaching in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Founded in 1889 by the physicist and mathematician Ernst Abbe, the Carl Zeiss Foundation is one of the oldest and largest private foundations promoting science in Germany. It is the sole owner of Carl Zeiss AG and SCHOTT AG. Its projects are financed by dividend distributions from the two foundation-owned companies.
Contact
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Markus Schaffert
Mainz University of Applied Sciences
Institute for Spatial Information and Measurement Technology i3mainz
Markus.schaffert (at) hs-mainz.de
