We present the technologies and the theoretical background of an intelligent interconnected infrastructure for public security and safety. The innovation of the framework lies in the intelligent combination of devices and human information towards human and situational awareness, so as to provide a protection and security environment for citizens. The framework is currently being used to support visitors in public spaces and events, by creating the appropriate infrastructure to address a set of urgent situations, such as health-related problems and missing children in overcrowded environments, supporting smart links between humans and entities on the basis of goals, and adapting device operation to comply with human objectives, profiles, and privacy. State-of-the-art technologies in the domain of IoT data collection and analytics are combined with localization techniques, ontologies, reasoning mechanisms, and data aggregation in order to acquire a better understanding of the ongoing situation and inform the necessary people and devices to act accordingly. Finally, we present the first results of people localization and the platforms’ ontology and representation framework.

This paper presents “DESMOS”, a novel ecosystem for the interconnection of smart infrastructures, mobile and wearable devices, and applications, to provide a secure environment for visitors and tourists. The presented solution brings together state-of-the-art IoT technologies, crowdsourcing, localization through BLE, and semantic reasoning, following a privacy and security-by-design approach to ensure data anonymization and protection. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the solution was tested, validated, and evaluated via two pilots in almost real settings—involving a fewer density of people than planned—in Trikala, Thessaly, Greece. The results and findings support that the presented solutions can provide successful emergency reporting, crowdsourcing, and localization via BLE. However, these results also prompt for improvements in the user interface expressiveness, the application’s effectiveness and accuracy, as well as evaluation in real, overcrowded conditions. The main contribution of this paper is to report on the progress made and to showcase how all these technological solutions can be integrated and applied in realistic and practical scenarios, for the safety and privacy of visitors and tourists.

As European cities transition to climate-neutral and smart mobility, ensuring these changes are inclusive, equitable, and safe for all users is crucial. This paper presents insights from the ELABORATOR Horizon Europe project in Trikala, where local stakeholders co-design sustainable mobility solutions. The research focuses on gendered urban and peri-urban travel, showing how care responsibilities, rural-urban divides, and safety concerns shape women’s mobility choices and access to sustainable modes. Although Trikala offers strong potential for active travel and digital mobility, current systems overlook the complexity of women’s routines. To address this, Trikala implements smart, data-driven interventions with a gender-inclusive focus. These include smart pedestrian crossings near schools, sensors on cycling lanes to detect illegal parking and obstruction, and a mobility app enabling multimodal, low-emission journey planning. The interventions combine real-time data, sensor networks, and participatory evidence to prioritise safety and accessibility. Complementing this is a series of participatory workshops identifying mobility barriers for women, caregivers, and older adults. Ultimately, this work advances inclusive urban transitions by embedding gender equity and transport safety into Trikala’s mobility planning, while contributing to scalable European mobility policies.