The first speech recognition aid to give a voice to people with severe speech impairment was the flagship technology on display at the launch of the University of Sheffield's new Centre for Assistive Technology and Connected Healthcare (CATCH). The voice input voice output communication aid, VIVOCA, is the only technology able to interpret the sounds made by people with speech impairment and translate them into clear, synthesized speech - enabling users to communicate beyond their close family and friends for the first time.

In 2050, will the economy be fundamentally altered because home 3D printers mean you can press a button to print your own clothes, a new sofa or kitchen table? Will cancer be a thing of the past thanks to nano-robots which can detect and destroy tumours? What will society look like when many live to over 100 years old?

Across Europe, providing health and social care services is becoming increasingly complex and costly. An aging population, a multitude of public, private and informal actors, together with a myriad of e-health systems and technologies create numerous hurdles to offering efficient and cost-effective care. A team of EU-funded researchers and practitioners are helping to get these services off the ground.

In a bioinformatics breakthrough, iMinds - STADIUS - KU Leuven researchers have successfully applied advanced artificial intelligence to enable the automated analysis of huge amounts of genetic data. Their new software suite, eXtasy, automatically generates the most likely cause of a given genetic disorder. The breakthrough directly impacts the treatment of millions of people with a hereditary disease.

Widespread adoption of cloud computing is essential for improving productivity levels in the European economy; but the spread of cloud could slow in light of recent revelations about PRISM and other surveillance programmes. These surveillance revelations have also led to calls for national or regional cloud computing initiatives. This challenge must be addressed and also turned into a Europe-wide opportunity: for companies operating in Europe to offer the trusted cloud services that more and more users are demanding globally.

The more accurately we can diagnose a disease, the greater the chance that the patient will survive. That is why many researchers are working to improve the quality of the diagnostic process. Researchers at the Nano-Science Center, University of Copenhagen have discovered a method that will make the process faster, cheaper and more accurate. This is possible, because they are combining advanced tools used in physics for research in biology at nanoscale, two scientific disciplines usually very distant from each other.

Europe's Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs) are delivering exciting results that will help to improve Europeans' quality of life and contribute to Europe's competitiveness - this is the key message from a series of events taking place in the European Parliament in Brussels this week. The events are timely, as the European Parliament will soon debate the European Commission’s proposals on JTIs under Horizon 2020.