New innovations

A great deal of effort in the project has been to find out more about the needs of customers. Surveys, workshops, face-toface meetings are among the methods used. With the knowledge of the customer, new innovations have been made possible. Servilocker - a midication locker that provides medication 24/7 - is one of those innovations. Customers are able to pick up medication outside of opening hours and they do not have to wait until opening hours of the pharmacy. Picking up medication goes via an unique personal code, sent to the customer by e-mail or sms.

41 mobile apps

Also 41 mobile applications have been developed within the ITRACT project. These applications are based on the needs of each region defined in the Service Innovations Workshops at the beginning of the project. These applications are the basis for the piloting process.

One of the apps tested by selected employees at Varmland County Council, Sweden, is "Business Travel". With this app the traveler is able to search their trip, pay and get a ticket in their mobile phone for work related trips with public transport. At the end of the month, an invoice is sent to their employer, who at the same time gets an overview of their employee travels.

The "tripplanner" app was developed at Karlstad University. The application shows bus stops with arrival and departure times and it allows for the planning of trips. As a special cross-border service, a manual GTFS feed on information from Public Express in Groningen, The Netherlands, into the ITRACT backend was created. This enables a user to plan a transnational trip using the ITRACT backend and the Tripplanner app.

In Rogaland County, Norway, the app "Real-time" was developed. The app does not plan your travel, but it identifies where you are with bus stops closest to you, and then tells you which busses will connect at a particular bus stop and when they are expected, including delays.

The"Scheduling" app, also developed in Rogaland County, Norway, utilizes Google Maps and Google Transit Feed Specification Reference, GTFS. The use of GTFS enables the scheduling app to connect to other regions. The consequence is that if you want to plan a travel from the University of Stavanger to a location at the University of Oslo, the planner tells you how to reach bus stop on foot, when next bus is expected according to the timetable, when you can transfer from bus to the train to Oslo, when you can transfer to the local Oslo bus, where to stop, and how to reach your destination on foot. All based on where you are and published schedules.

Architecture and pilots

Much of the work in ITRACT has focused on creating and maintaining the central ICT architecture that supports apps. The Hanze University, UAS, Groningen, The Netherlands, and the University of Karlstad, Sweden, collaborate intensively on the architecture. The architecture is supported by a technical infrastructure consisting of a number of servers that are deployed in multiple countries. These servers are combined through software into one large virtual infrastructure.

A lot of work has also been put into the testing of apps and prototypes. A toolbox was created, to be used by every region and process of pilot testing was divided into three stages: test preparations, pilot testing and pilot evaluation. The process of piloting, which means the running and testing of applications in real life conditions, is almost finished for most of the pilots in the ITRACT project.

Reach the audience

It is important to reach the target groups for the project and the findings within the project have been presented in different media, meetings, user empowerment workshops, papers, cross-border and EU conferences by the partners in the project. It will also be produced several Best Practice Guides as well as a popular version of the Good Practice Guide, which summarizes the findings of the project.

Next step in the ITRACT project

With only some months left of the project, the work in the work packages now mainly consists of writing Best Practice Guides and reports.

The final conference will be held in Groningen on the 5th of February 2015.