Our journey across the BLUETWIN-CE partnership continues. After visiting partners in Italy, Hungary and Slovenia, we now travel further east to discover how local knowledge, community engagement and real-life health data are helping to shape another of our three pilot areas.
🇸🇰 Our next stop is Slovakia, where Take naše connects BLUETWIN-CE with the town of Svidník and works closely with the people and organisations supporting local seniors.
Take naše is the territorial partner of BLUETWIN-CE in Slovakia. We connect the project with the pilot town of Svidník and the people who work with seniors every day, making sure the digital twin is built on real local data and needs. We started the year by hosting the partnership’s kick-off meeting in Košice in February.
Svidník, the project’s easternmost pilot area, is a district town of 10,000 people without the capacity to run an international project on its own. So we implement it on the town’s behalf and together with it: we bring the know-how, the town brings the people, relationships and decisions.
We didn’t just ask – we measured. In June, at the town and district Senior Olympics, we worked with the Slovak Red Cross Svidník and the Union of Pensioners of Slovakia to reach 90 seniors. Besides the EQ-5D-5L quality-of-life questionnaire, we measured their blood pressure, height and weight on site, giving the digital twin objective health data. Data collection continues with Svidník Hospital.
Scenarios built on the town’s plans. With the town, we developed four scenarios for the digital twin to simulate: service accessibility, preventive programmes, social connectivity and infrastructure for movement. Each is anchored in local and national strategies. National strategies call for modern technologies in social services, but the town’s plan does not include them yet, and BLUETWIN-CE fills exactly this gap. The scenarios build on real investments, such as the cycle path along the Ondava River and the new multi-purpose sports ground.
A community to build on. Svidník has run participatory budgeting for seven years, with 15 citizen projects under way. The willing people and organisations are there; what is missing is coordination under the town’s lead, and we are now working on that together.
What’s next. We are asking 20 local professionals what they need to learn, developing a stress-management training module and drawing on the experience of our associated partner Zhiva. A local workshop follows in late November.
Would more activities for lonely seniors make a difference? Would the new path get people moving? Svidník will soon test it in the digital twin, before spending a single euro.
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