Research

eHealth - making clear the legal context

eHealth services promise to improve the quality and provision of care while reducing costs. However questions exist over the legal and regulatory implications for particular eHealth services. One initiative, 'Legally eHealth', aims to help remove those doubts.

There is little current information available about the legal implications of eHealth. However growing interest in and implementation of eHealth systems is certain to bring this topic to the fore. Hence the interest in the Legally eHealth study.

ERC Scientific Council agrees 2007 work programme

The Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC) has finalised the first draft of its work programme for 2007, outlining who will be eligible to apply for funding from the ERC, and how proposals will be evaluated.

The ERC is a new initiative, and is due to begin operating in 2007 as part of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). As the work programme explains, "The fundamental principle for all ERC activities is that of stimulating investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of excellence."

Opening European eHealth research programmes to new participants

As Europe's population ages, improving healthcare and inclusion for the elderly is becoming a fast expanding field of research. But researchers in the new member states and candidate countries have been slow to take advantage of IST funding and cooperation in these areas. The EPIST project team sought to change that.

"The main problem is that research organisations and companies in the New Member Countries (NMCs) and Associated Candidate Countries (ACCs) don't know how EU research projects work," explains EPIST coordinator Ira Vater of European Business Associates in Italy.

SAPHIRE: Intelligent Healthcare Monitoring based on Semantic Interoperability Platform

Supporting Healthcare Professionals with Advanced Tools to Reduce their Loads
The medical practitioners at all levels are becoming more overloaded as the aging population of Europe increases. The health services of the EU can claim considerable credit for the decline in mortality over the last thirty years. However this success, particularly the fall in mortality rates among older people, has increased the demand for healthcare.

IST project seeks to improve online news delivery

Researchers working on an EU-funded project have developed a new set of semantic Web tools which they claim will help users find the online news that matters to them most, more quickly.

Internet must remain the driver for democracy and economic development

The first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) begins yesterday in Athens. It is an important milestone agreed last November at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis (WSIS) as part of the drive to internationalise internet governance, to safeguard freedom online and to bridge the global digital divide.

Semantic-web technologies for enhanced knowledge management

Effective knowledge management is key to navigating the sea of information being made available using internet technologies. And participants in the IST project SEKT aim to lay the foundations for that greater effectiveness, by developing three core technologies for the semantic web.

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