We travel to Portugal with ART-SWINES, the European project digitalising veterinary training.

At Imascono we keep clocking up miles alongside the ART-SWINES consortium, this time bound for Portugal, where we met with the other partners to review the project's progress and work on the development of the tool. These in-person meetings are the heart of a European project: they align teams from different countries, validate the technical work on the ground and maintain the coordination that a development of this complexity demands.

ART-SWINES brings together the University of Zaragoza, the University of Évora, the University of Padua, the Spanish Cluster of Pig Producers (i+Porc) and “Europea Polska”, alongside Imascono as technology partner. A transnational collaboration to which we contribute the piece that defines us: turning a real training need into a digital product that works.

ART-SWINES is a project co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme that is building a virtual platform capable of interconnecting the teaching infrastructures of several universities in the field of pig production through virtual reality. The goal is clear: to create a training methodology that digitalises on-farm practice and overcomes two historical barriers to this kind of teaching, infrastructure limitations and the biosecurity restrictions that make it hard for students to access real environments.

For Imascono, projects like this one distil our way of understanding technology: applying it where it solves a specific problem. This isn't about digitalising for its own sake, but about giving veterinary students across Europe a hands-on, safe and replicable learning experience that would otherwise be hard to guarantee. In other words, putting technology at the service of training.