The challenges of the Kesennuma Kizuna Project

After the Tohoku Earthquake at 11 March, 2011, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) launched a cross-discipline partnership project; “Kesennuma Kizuna Project”, in the disaster area Kesennuma, Miyagi Pref. We started new activities for implementing smart communities' technologies, such as energy managements, robots' life care technologies, monitoring systems, etc., to activate the human connections/relationships of trust with the organization; “smart life-care consortium” This research started with the question of how we could build and enrich the relationships of trust that would be the basis of partnerships. This paper briefly reviews the projects, shows some of the technological results, and make some discussions.