Digital technologies are transforming industries across Europe

Discovery series shows how technology kickstarts opportunities in urban and rural Europe

"Being Digi Sapiens," a documentary series by Warner Brothers Discovery

Digital technologies are transforming industries across Europe – from Spanish hospitals to German vineyards to warehouses in the Netherlands.

This digital transformation is vividly illustrated in "Being Digi-Sapiens," a documentary series made by Warner Brothers Discovery with support from Huawei.

The series follows Swedish inventor, roboticist, and YouTuber Simone Giertz as she travels across Europe to find out how technology is transforming daily life.

In Episode One, "Connecting with Ourselves," Simone visits a home claiming to have "the fastest internet in Germany." She also drops in on a sports lab in Finland, where tech helps athletes improve their fitness and performance. And, at a 600-year-old hospital in Barcelona, Simone examines the digital twin of a patient’s heart, handling a life-sized replica made on a 3-D printer.

Episode Two, "Connecting with Others," takes Simone to Málaga, Spain, where the municipal government has teamed up with Huawei to lay the foundation of a smart city by providing free public Wi-Fi in one of Málaga’s oldest public markets.

Stable Wi-Fi connections enable merchants to take orders online and use digital platforms for invoicing and payment. It also lets them operate outside of normal working hours and do business beyond their immediate geographic area, even selling produce in other cities.

Alicia Izquierdo, Councillor for Innovation at Málaga City Hall, believes that building out Málaga’s network of Wi-Fi hotspots will encourage entrepreneurs to start new ventures that will stimulate the city’s economy.

"The next thing we will do is launch a marketplace platform where it will be possible to do online commerce for all market businesses," Izquierdo says. "The city of Málaga is becoming a smart city."

From there, Simone continues on to Germany, where she visits a winery run by three generations of the same family. The owners explain that digital tech has simplified the wine-making process by keeping track of what work has been done, and what tasks remain, at each of the hundreds of grape-growing parcels of land within the estate. 5G connectivity enables farmers at the winery to monitor everything from the humidity in the soil to pest damage. The information is uploaded to the "Vineyard Cloud," where it is analyzed by artificial intelligence.

Finally, at the KLG Logistics Center in Wallwijk in the Netherlands, Simone observes 5G-powered robots at one of Huawei’s main supply and logistics centers in Europe. Autonomous machines perform repetitive and potentially risky tasks, such as stacking shipping pallets on high shelves.

While much has been made of the threat robots may pose to human employment, warehouse workers told Simone they were happy to have machines performing such duties for them.

In the series final installment, Episode 3, "Connecting with Nature," Simone discovers how technology can help us better prepare and adapt to climate change. And in rural Finland, she talks to fish in a frozen lake.