Further research is needed to determine the impact of electromagnetic fields on health, particularly in the long term, according to the latest Opinion published by the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR).

Electromagnetic fields come from a range of devices, including power lines, electrical appliances, mobile phones, video displays and certain diagnostic instrumentation.

With the financial support of the European Commission within the framework of eTEN programme, the Danish RoboBraille service is currently being tested in Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and the United Kingdom.

RoboBraille is an e-mail based service that translates written documents to and from Braille or synthetic speech. The service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users. The primary group targeted for this service is the visually impaired and other print-impaired readers.

eHealth ERA contributes to greater transparency of national eHealth strategies, roadmaps and implementation activities.

The vision of transparent European healthcare systems which deliver high quality healthcare to all citizens independent of their location when in need of care is coming closer to reality. A European eHealth space facilitates this development.

The recently launched CancerGrid Project will bring together partners from industry and academia in the first ever large scale application of computer grid technology for finding and developing new anti-cancer agents.

The three-year multidisciplinary research programme funded by the EU will aim to combine new technologies with biology to enrich molecular libraries and increase the likelihood of discovering potential drugs to treat cancer.

Researchers in MAIA, an EU funded project, have shown how a person can control, using only their brain, the wheelchair on which they are sitting.

This requires tapping into the person's neural network, interpreting the cerebral signals in real time and then developing a mechanism that could respond to these instructions and steer the wheelchair with a high degree of accuracy.

As of May 2007, the mobile emergency device that was tested in the international project MobilAlarm will be marketed. empirica co-ordinated this project from April 2004 to August 2005. The European Commission supported MobilAlarm in the framework of its programme eTEN electronic Trans-European Networks.

EU Member States and Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway have adopted a common declaration on their commitment to pursue structured cooperation on cross-border electronic health services across Europe.

"By adopting today's Declaration, we seek to ensure that, in the future, electronic health services for Europe's citizens do not stop at national borders," said the German State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Health, Dr Klaus Theo Schröder.