The Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AAL JP) celebrates its third year of activity and we want to celebrate this event with the publication of this catalogue to showcase the objectives and progress made by the funded projects. Over the past three years, we worked together with the 23 Partner Countries (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Israel, Norway and Switzerland) and the European Commission to ensure continuity and quality of our project work.

Not knowing the clear direction that the healthcare reform initiatives will take over the next several years, healthcare organizations remain under intense pressure to reduce costs and repair inefficiencies. Most organizations understand that to successfully execute, they have to manage cost and key performance measurements across business lines. Yet, few are able to attain this. Healthcare provider organizations find themselves in the middle of market pressures from payers, the government and competing for market share and doctors.

Healthcare reform in dozens of countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Chile, Canada, Taiwan, China and the United States, is generating dramatically new approaches to care delivery. Although the details and the level of maturity of the efforts differ across countries, the overall trends are universal: they reflect the need to contain costs while improving access and care quality, to overcome a shortage of providers, and to take care of a growing sicker and ageing population.

Health device makers, to date, have primarily targeted consumers who are either fitness focused or chronically ill. But between these two extremes sits a large, fragmented and often overlooked population who seek better information to effectively manage their health. Our research suggests that successful solution providers will approach this market opportunity as an ecosystem of partners - with an integrated solution that extends beyond the device itself. By plugging the information gap for these consumers, solution providers can help fuel healthcare innovation.

Global Observatory for eHealth series - Volume 3.
Only five years ago who would have imagined that today a woman in sub-Saharan Africa could use a mobile phone to access health information essential to bringing her pregnancy safely to term? Mobile phones are now the most widely used communication technology in the world. They continue to spread at an exponential rate - particularly in developing countries. This expansion provides unprecedented opportunities to apply mobile technology for health.

At this early stage of the twenty-first century, Europe's health systems and services are under extreme pressure. It is vital to discover how acute hospitals use eHealth services today. To understand this use may enable hospital systems to handle future challenges. Helping to develop and test a robust survey instrument that can uncover such information is an important step in policy terms and in the development of methodologies.

The number one challenge facing healthcare providers and public health and social services agencies is delivering higher quality care to more patients and citizens at a lower cost. A major obstacle is that the diverse players in the health ecosystem traditionally run their own applications in silos, with no interconnection among these applications. The result: no integrated view of how patient care and citizen health information is delivered across the health ecosystem.