Elderly people may move abroad temporarily or permanently for various reasons, such as to receive some kind of treatment, get care from their family, or just travel around for pleasure. Their right to lead a life of independence and participate in social and cultural life is recognized by the European Union in the Charter of Fundamental Rights (article 25 - the rights of the elderly).

However, when elderliness is accompanied by disability, moving abroad becomes quite difficult. Elderly people need and usually receive privileged treatment tailored to their special conditions from local authorities in their home country, like discounted and private transportation, health services, sport rehabilitation and psycho-social services. However, when they move to another country, they usually cannot benefit from these kinds of services as they are not officially recognized by the local authorities. If they want to apply to these authorities to receive services provided to elderly citizens with disabilities, bureaucratic processes and associated paperwork are demanding and tiring, mainly due to the lack of clear guidance and sufficient information, the long waiting times for appointments in the involved administration authorities, as well as the language barrier. Moreover, the application process usually requires several physical visits, which makes the whole process even more problematic.

This demonstrator will showcase the potential of the GLASS solution for transactions taking place between a country of the EU (Greece) and a country outside the EU (Turkey), which can be administratively challenging, especially for people with special needs, such as the elderly and disabled. Our goal is to simplify the bureaucratic processes for (senior) citizens with disabilities when it comes to travelling for a short or medium period of time and evaluate our solution in such a demanding scenario. It is worth mentioning that all the documents to be stored and the distributed procedures to issue such documents will support the policies of the European e-government Action Plan 2016-2020 and all the associated priorities, including the Digital by Default, Openness & Transparency and Once-only priorities.

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This demonstrator will follow the situation of Athens,-based, Konstantinos, who is invited to visit his grandchildren in Istanbull for six months. The grandchildren would like to take care of Konstantinos since he is a 60-years old, disabled man and has not been out of Athens for many years. Happily, Konstantinos accepts the invitation and decides to live in Istanbul for 6 months to spend time with his grandchildren and also visit and enjoy the city. However, in order to facilitate his well-being, he needs some services for health, transportation, sports rehabilitation and psycho-social services (services that he had access to while in Athens). Unfortunately, in order to access these services he has to deal with a series of bureaucratic processes;

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GLASS will facilitate his needs.

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Please note that demonstrator details may be subject to change.