Make the most of your holiday this summer, even if you do happen to have unlucky breaks. Having a vacation in the European Union should mean rest and relaxation. But for the unfortunate few, it means accident and emergency. Breaking your ankle while dancing in a beach club or while mountain climbing can spoil your holidays. Thanks to the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC), a card that in recent years has become a very important one to carry, you may be laying on the beach or be back in the mountains the very next day without a care in the world.

Both the European Union and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have recognised ICT-facilitated solutions as key enablers for modern, patient-centered and efficient healthcare services. To support health policies, it has become mandatory to monitor and benchmark Health ICT (eHealth) adoption and use.

PORTFASTFLU is a €3.8 million, European Union FP7 funded project which aims to develop and validate a rapid diagnostic system for influenza that will be used for surveillance and early detection of influenza, and as a point-of-care tool in developed and developing countries.

Three years ago, researchers at the EU-funded ElderGames project set out to create a high-tech play platform specifically for the elderly - the first designed to provide cognitive and social stimulation, and to allow early detection of cognitive decline.

The European Commission has released details of the first projects to receive support under the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) Joint Technology Initiative (JTI). The 15 projects will share a EUR 246 million funding pot. EUR 110 million of this will come from the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), while the pharmaceutical industry will provide the remaining EUR 136 million through in kind contributions (e.g. staff, laboratory facilities, materials and clinical research).

The Living Human Digital Library Project (LHDL) is a grass-roots initiative aimed at developing an in silico model of the human neuromusculoskeletal system that can predict how mechanical forces are exchanged internally and externally, from the whole body down to the protein level, consistently with scope of the European Virtual Physiological Human initiative.

Europeans should be able to have control over smart chips, a worldwide market set to grow five times over in the next decade, while still being able to easily use them to make everyday life simpler. There are already over 6 billion smart chips, microelectronic devices that can be integrated into a variety of everyday objects from fridges to bus passes.