Simon Mobile integrates with a new concept of parking card for the disabled (commonly known as Blue Badge) that is currently being tested in a large-scale pilot running at several European cities. The goal of this badge is to reduce the fraudulent use of disabled parking spots to ensure that they are available to the persons that really need them. Combined with a Simon disabled badge, disabled citizens can use Simon Mobile to validate for parking and to view the usage history of their badge.
The application is currently available so that any user can install it on their mobile device through the web page: http://simon-project.eu. Users of Madrid, Lisbon, Parma and Reading can also request, via this website, to participate in the pilot tests with the new blue badge to test the validation functions.
SIMON – asSIsted Mobililty for Older aNd impaired users - is a demonstration oriented project, started in January 2014, with large scale pilots in Madrid, Lisbon, Parma and Reading. SIMON aims at promoting the independent living and societal participation of mobility impaired people in the context of public parking areas and multiple transport modes, through the adoption of specific navigation information and access-rights management solutions. To do so is integrating different ICT solutions that enable users to significantly improve their mobility, promoting their access to the available information, providing new tools and ensuring management of their access rights safely.
The project is addressing two major milestones: the reduction of fraud in the use of the European parking card, through ICT solutions (smart cards and mobile devices); and multimodal navigation-specific solutions for the elderly and disabled.
The modernization of the European Parking Card and the provision of several services to assist mobility are therefore the main pillars of this project in which seven partners are actively involved: the company ETRA I+D (Spain), Instituto de Biomecánica (Spain), Locoslab GmbH (Germany), Empresa Pública Municipal de Mobilidade e Estacionamento de Lisboa (Portugal), the Madrid City Council (Spain), Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid (Spain) and Infomobility SpA (Italy). To complement and reinforce the role of the partners, a large User Group was defined to be actively involved in the system development and pilot testing, involving different bodies at national (CERMI, UDP, ACAPO, ANMIC, Lisboa city council,...) and European level (AGE, POLIS, EPA,...).
The participation of all these entities will be crucial in the coming months as the pilot phase which now begins in Madrid, Lisbon and Parma aims to involve up to 5,000 users among people with disabilities, seniors, relatives, workers and public services managers. This ambitious goal will enable to deploy all the services covered by the project so as to demonstrate the utility of SIMON in real contexts and enable its implementation in Europe.
More information about the SIMON project can be obtained at: http://simon-project.eu
