R&D PROJECTS

Project Overview

Isn’t our society becoming one where inducing encounters with new communities is difficult?

Mobility in the physical space is declining due to the stagnating local transportation networks associated with the declining birthrate and the aging population. In addition, mobility in the information space is declining due to immobilized individual interests and thoughts influenced by the filter bubble (a phenomenon in which preferred information is automatically selected and narrowed to similar opinions and interests) caused by the society of overloaded information and selective contact. These two issues are now posing concerns. In recent years, new forms of communities that do not require physical transfer, such as the metaverse, are drawing attention. However, without the opportunity and interest to visit them, increasing the number of community venues people can rely on is difficult. If people depend only on a few limited communities and stay there, they may end up with social isolation and loneliness.

Developing models that utilize service mobility aiming to create a society abound with opportunities for encounters

In order to solve these issues, this project aims to draw and develop a new social vision that does not produce isolation and loneliness and induces incidental encounters and attachments not bound by temporal and spatial constraints by utilizing information and mobility technology as tools. To begin with, we will clarify the mechanism of isolation and loneliness by measuring people’s opportunities to contact and participate in new information and communities by collecting and analyzing subjective and objective data, identifying the relationship between the results and isolation and loneliness metrics and attempting to visualize and index the measured isolation and loneliness risks. Furthermore, to induce incidental encounters and attachments based on the new findings, we will construct a model for preventing isolation and loneliness, which can be connected to multiple forms of online and offline communities as “portals” utilizing 1) “venues” where residents can gather and 2) service mobility (mobile vending cars, mobile libraries, mobile health checkup cars, etc.) that circulate the community, with a demonstration experiment planned in Oiso Town.

Q&A

Please tell us more about the social vision this project aims to achieve for the primary prevention of social isolation and loneliness.

People feel isolated and lonely on various occasions, such as life stage transitions and disasters. However, the common causes of isolation and loneliness can be “environmental changes beyond expectations” and “environmental changes not even imagined.” If the onset of isolation and loneliness is unpredictable, constantly increasing diverse connections that can survive unexpected situations is essential to preventing isolation and loneliness. Therefore, we aim to create a social vision in which all members of society share the awareness that “constantly increasing diverse connections is necessary to improving the resilience of individual lives and communities” and that such an approach will be supported in many ways.

What are the biggest challenges (bottlenecks) in achieving the social vision above?

There are various communities within the region and online, and other projects are considered to work on creating new community venues. The critical challenge for this project is how we get the residents in the region to know this project exists and how we encourage them to visit the portals. Getting the residents to know and visit our portals would require coincidental encounters and active energy. The downward trend in mobility in physical and information space in modern society is thought to lower the coincidence that leads to new encounters, hence requiring more active energy. We aim to create a social model that can induce encounters by utilizing service mobility that circles the community while increasing the coincidence and suppressing the necessary energy.

Participating/Cooperating Institutions

• Tokai National Higher Education and Research System Nagoya University, The University of Tokyo, Keio University, Seisa University, Internet ITS Consortium, The Consortium for Business Innovation and Local Value Creation Project in Oiso, Oiso Town, Kanagawa Prefecture, Regional IoT and Informative Force Research Consortium, The Keio Research Institute at SFC, Health Information Consortium, The Keio Research Institute at SFC, Tao Haus, and others.