A medical train that takes advantage of unused railway lines to bring health services to the populations living along the tracks. It is “Doctor Train”, the winning idea of the “Building the Future” Summer School dedicated to young enthusiasts of Europe, mobility and innovation, promoted by TELT together with the Collège des Ingénieurs, and named after Mario Virano, the first general director of the Italian company -French in charge of building the cross-border section of the Turin-Lyon.
Nicolò Caruso, Davide Centin, Alessandro Chionne and Jonathan Di Paola, have imagined a way to exploit the existing infrastructure, therefore without generating new land consumption, to offer a service in peripheral areas and consequently reduce the use of cars for travel.
They focused on a historic railway, the Avellino-Rocchetta Sant’Antonio that connects Campania and Puglia: the idea is a train of doctors that, through fixed stops with a weekly program, reaches the local population with medical services provided directly on board the train.
The jury, made up of Marzia Giacoia, Head of Sustainable Development at TELT, Alissa Bauer, Innovation Consultant at the Collège des Ingénieurs and Francesco Trovato, CEO of Paperbox, considered that the challenge had all the components of a sustainable and innovative project: vision, analysis of the stakeholders and an effective presentation of the idea.
The winning group will present their project during an event in the presence of managers of international companies working on the construction of the cross-border section of the Turin-Lyon.
“The Summer School was an opportunity for discussion with young professionals and the presentation of the projects went beyond our expectations: the kids demonstrated that they understood that designing also means thinking outside the box, combining concreteness and creativity. And this is the legacy of the Arch. Vino that we would also like to pass on to the new generations” said the deputy general director of TELT, Manuela Rocca, one year after the death of the architect Virano, one year after his death on 29 June 2023.
The other projects
The other teams presented a project to incentivize the use of the railway between Turin and Milan while producing clean energy, an innovative suit with real-time alert sensors to protect workers underground, and a robot to purify air from PM10 in urban construction areas.
La Summer School
Over the course of two weeks, the twenty participants, young people under 30 with different backgrounds (engineering, international & political sciences, architecture), developed their solutions through a design thinking process: starting from a specific problem proposed, they carried out research depth on the topic, they moved on to the creation of various solutions, reaching the final project through validation steps with the direct support of the experts of the College des Ingénieurs team, on the innovation side, and of TELT, on the infrastructure side.
At the same time, the students attended lessons by experts, teachers and professionals from different sectors on key topics related to the development of large infrastructures: geopolitical dimension and international relations, good practices for sustainable development, innovation processes, security solutions, potential of artificial intelligence.
