Call for Proposals and Take-Up Projects

In order to facilitate the acceptance of wearable computing in working environments, in 2006 the EC allocated an additional funding within the project wearIT@work. The funding amounting to 380K€ was designated to finance 50% of the costs of one or two technology take-up projects.
The most important scope of this call was to show the applicability of wearables also in other sectors and business scenarios.
The organisation of the take-up call was coordinated by ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Environment), one of the wearIT@work partners responsible for dissemination and exploitation of project’s results in cooperation with TZI, InfoConsult, BIA and Edna Pasher Ph.D. & Associates.

The basic principles of the call were the following:

• Testing of wearable computing technology in other industrial sectors or/and different business scenarios. A typical take-up project consortium includes at least one final user partner willing to experiment with wearable computing technology in its working environment. Other partners were technology providers and/or system integrators.
• penness: the call was opened to everybody (with the usual restrictions for geographic distribution and types of legal entities used in the FP6). 
• Independent evaluation: the take-up project proposals were evaluated by external individuals proposed by the EC.

In order to advertise the call, a series of one-day workshops (Road Shows) was organised in several countries:

• Rome, Italy, 30 May 2006.
• Tel Aviv, Israel, 04 June 2006.
• Bremen, Germany, 08 June 2006.
• Madrid, Spain, 28 June 2006.

The workshops included the following arguments:

• Wearable computing: 2010 roadmap;
• wearIT@work project and take-up call;
• Presentations of the four Business Cases pilot applications;
• wearIT@work Transferable technologies;
• Take-up Call: basic requirements and procedures.

(Click here to view the Take-up Call and the Road Shows documentation)

The events aimed to highlight the potential applications and the advantages of Wearable computing technology through the presentation of the four pilot cases currently running inside the wearit@work project.
The goal was to stimulate new further project ideas among participants in order to transfer the same approach in different/other sectors.

After the call, the following three new take-up projects were selected:

• FRAIL, “Farmer Rangers in Lunigiana”, which tests innovation in mobile technologies and wearable computing in the context of fire prevention, monitoring and control in rural and mountain areas.
• uWEAR, “Wearable Computing for you” which brings navigational services to visually impaired users by adapting and extending existing wearIT@work wearable components.
• wearIT@CH “Wearable Solution for the Cultural Heritage Sector”, which aims the valorization, the cultural mediation and the preservation in archaeological sites by assisting site guardians, site administrators as well as site visitors.

The Take-up projects will last about 18 months.