The European Commission has proposed a follow up to the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AAL JP) for 2014 - 2020, to continue the success of the present programme in applied research for ageing well with ICT. The aim of the AAL JP is to support industry, in particular SME to bring digital innovative products and services for ageing well to the European market. Alignment with the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP AHA) could further boost deployment at European scale.
The GRANATUM web portal is now online, ready to connect biomedical researchers. The public GRANATUM IT platform provides access to information about cancer research and established pharmaceutical agents from 83 global data sources in an integrated, semantically interlinked manner.
The Strategic Intelligence Monitor on Personal Health Systems (SIMPHS) research started in 2009 with the analysis of the market for Remote Patient Monitoring and Treatment (RMT) within Personal Health Systems (PHS) from a supply side perspective. The objective was to assess the RMT market current size and future growth perspectives, provide an understanding of the market structure, innovation dynamics, types of market players involved and strategies followed, and ultimately identify market drivers and barriers as well as areas for policy action.
Some 165 million Europeans are likely to experience some form of brain-related disease during their life. As the population ages, Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative or age-related mental disorders are affecting more people and contributing to higher health costs.
A safer and healthier old age - that is the aim of GiraffPlus, an international project led by researchers at Örebro University, Sweden. With a focus of developing sophisticated aids for the elderly in close collaboration with the intended users, the project is now about to test the new technology in real homes.
Engineers and biologists at the University of Sheffield have shown how a recent theory - that skin has 'sleeping' stem cells which can be woken up when required - best explains how our skin constantly regrows. The research - conducted in collaboration with The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G), makers of Olay, and published in Nature Scientific Reports - has implications for combating the effects of aging and perhaps even skin cancer.
Surgeons-to-be no longer have to practice on cadavers but can use "organ phantoms" instead. They may also practice with "virtual surgical simulators" and operating room monitoring systems. Those and other methods for improving patient safety in robotic surgery are the results of the large scale EU funded SAFROS project. The SAFROS project (7th Framework Programme) successfully passed its final review.