A doctor from the UK has shown how an innovative music video can help increase awareness of how to treat asthma. Dr Tapas Mukherjee, from Glenfield Hospital in the UK, produced and starred in a music video to draw attention to new guidelines showing a better way of managing asthma. A study presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Annual Congress in Barcelona today, has demonstrated the success of this video and suggests that social media can be used to successfully improve medical practice.

A highly customisable robot companion designed by EU-funded researchers to offer support to older people is currently being presented across Europe and could find its way into people's homes within two or three years, potentially greatly enhancing quality of life for older citizens and people with memory or mobility problems.

From eHealth to mHealth: Society becomes the driver of its health activities
The further use of wireless internet and gadgets that receive and transmit data (tablet computers, smartphones and laptops) have constituted a new trend in eHealth, providing for more on-the-spot services. Mobile health (known as mHealth) is a developing trend in the eHealth field that encompasses and exploits much broader use of mobile telecommunications and multimedia technologies as they are integrated within increasingly mobile and wireless healthcare delivery systems.

Six cutting-edge projects are in the running for the prestigious €10,000 European Health Award 2013, sponsored by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Health and FOPI, which brings together Austria's research-based pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The winner will be chosen by a panel of leading health experts, and announced during the 16th EHFG conference, being held in the Gastein Valley from the 2nd to 4th October.

Does psychotherapy via the Internet work? For the first time, clinical researchers from the University of Zurich have studied whether online psychotherapy and conventional face-to-face therapy are equally effective in experiments. Based on earlier studies, the Zurich team assumed that the two forms of therapy were on a par. Not only was their theory confirmed, the results for online therapy even exceeded their expectations.

Scientists in Switzerland, Germany, and France explored how the insect eye works and designed and built the first fully-functional miniature curved artificial compound eyes. The "CURVACE" project received €2 million in EU funding to develop the miniature "insect" eyes, which have high industrial potential in mobile robotics, smart clothing and medical applications.

No computer works as efficiently as the human brain - so much so that building an artificial brain is the goal of many scientists. Neuroinformatics researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich have now made a breakthrough in this direction by understanding how to configure so-called neuromorphic chips to imitate the brain's information processing abilities in real-time.