European Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou presented the results of the recent consultation on health services to the Informal Health Council in Aachen, Germany on 20 April. The results show that most contributors favour some form of EU action on health services, combining both legislative elements and practical support for cooperation between European health systems.

Contributors saw a need for better information to patients to enable informed choices about cross-border care and greater clarity about the procedures to follow, with a broad consensus that quality and safety of healthcare should be ensured by the country where treatment is provided.

The increasing convergence of biology, medicine and genetics provides an opportunity to leverage synergies between the three areas for the benefit of health. Biology and genetics are emerging as information sciences while medicine is increasingly adopting information systems and informatics approaches to support healthcare delivery.

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.