Social changes and a growing ageing population call for innovative solutions. Enter the EU-funded CAALYX (Complete ambient assisting living experiment) project, whose partners have successfully developed a prototype system comprising a home monitoring system, a mobile roaming monitoring system and a caretaker centre. This system will be particularly beneficial for the elderly and patients living at home.

European researchers have developed a virtual liver that promises to improve the prospects of recovery for patients with diseases such as liver cancer and cirrhosis of the liver. The initial work was carried out in the framework of the EUREKA project Odysseus. EUREKA promotes international, market-oriented research.

The wireless devices are currently being sold by McRoberts, a Netherlands-based company that developed them as part of the SensAction-AAL project, an EU-funded initiative to create remote mobility monitoring solutions coordinated by the University of Bologna. Unlike many health monitoring systems that require multiple sensors as well as separate components for data storage and transmission, the DynaPort Hybrid device and MoveMonitor application developed by the SensAction-AAL researchers carry out movement sensing, data collection and data transmission in a single compact package.

Falls are the main cause of injuries among elderly people, but until now doctors have had few ways of effectively monitoring and counteracting mobility problems among patients. Work by European researchers is set to change that.

eHealthNews.EU Portal, the first European eHealth news portal, is presenting the Top 20 news articles of the year 2009, according to the most commonly viewed pages:

1. Top Articles - 2009
Top Articles by months (January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December).

The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation announced that it is making source code for the IHTSDO Workbench, including tools to develop, maintain, and facilitate the use of SNOMED CT, freely available under an Apache2 open source agreement.

The European Network for Cell Imaging and Tracking Expertise (ENCITE) is a four year project funded by the European Commission that started in June 2008 and consists of 29 international scientific partners from ten countries, co-ordinated by the European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research (EIBIR).