Status:
✅ Finalized
⇨
Context
People are living longer, family ties are looser, and a growing number of older residents live alone, while demand on municipal social services keeps rising. The COVID-19 crisis made these pressures more visible and more urgent. Traditional tele-assistance depends on the user pressing a button to call for help — a model that fails precisely when the person is unable to act.
Specific problem
Sensor-based monitoring can detect emergencies automatically, but it requires collecting personal data continuously: when someone gets out of bed, moves around the home, opens a door, or uses an appliance. Taken together, this data draws a detailed picture of an older person’s daily routine and of the hours when they are not at home. In the wrong hands it can be used to track or target a vulnerable resident. If the data stream is altered, a tele-assistance provider may act on false information, with direct consequences for the person’s safety.
Current situation and gap
The barrier to scaling this kind of IoT application is not the sensors — it is the security of the data they produce. GDPR compliance on its own does not prevent external attacks, nor does it prove that stored records have not been modified. What is missing is an integrated approach that combines interoperable data collection across devices from different manufacturers, access control over raw data, verifiable storage integrity, and data-subject rights built into the application itself. Without that, neither providers nor residents have a reason to trust continuous monitoring.
Specific need
The city and its tele-assistance providers need well-being monitoring that works without user action, and a security layer solid enough that continuous data collection in people’s homes is acceptable to operators, residents and families alike.
Expected outcome
– Continuous sensor-based monitoring that detects emergencies and unusual behaviour without the resident having to call for help
– Interoperable, scalable data collection across heterogeneous sensors and manufacturers, with access control over raw data and devices
– Verifiable data integrity, so that any tampering with stored monitoring records is detectable
– Data-subject rights — access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, portability — implemented at application level with minimal development effort
– Demonstrated trust and acceptance from both tele-assistance staff and the residents being monitored
– Secure, anonymised reuse of activity data, including aggregated reporting that providers can share with municipal social services
Santander offers a mature, real-world experimentation environment for connected services. The Smart Santander IoT facility, running since 2010, provides established urban sensing infrastructure and a decade of pilot experience, and Santander City Council acts as a deployment partner framing the work around supporting older residents who wish to keep living independently.
Solutions can be tested in occupied homes rather than in laboratory conditions, through the city’s links with experienced tele-assistance providers and their existing user networks. Santander also offers continuity across European and Japanese smart-city collaboration — the city recurs alongside Fujisawa in ClouT, BigClouT and M-Sec — giving innovators access to an EU–Japan network of research institutions, cities and industry partners.
Get in touch to express your interest or explore how you can contribute.
