The European Union has launched 27 e-health projects this year following a call under the EU Framework Programme 7 (FP7).
The Seventh Research Framework Programme, which runs until 2013 with a budget of €50 billion, has launched projects in three key areas; ICT for personal health systems, ICT for patient safety, and international cooperation on virtual physiological human.
The EU’s Research and Development Framework Programmes aim to bring together teams from different organisations and EU countries, to combine knowledge and experience to improve the standard of living for people in Europe.
The projects around Personal Health Systems look at key technologies, such as biosensors and secure communications, which can be built into ‘smart clothes’ and implants which help patients and their doctors monitor and manage their health status.
Newly launched projects include the ICT4Depression consortium which is developing and ICT-based system for primary care to improve access to treatment by providing devices for monitoring activities and automatic assessment of the patient using mobile phone and web based communication.
Patient Safety projects address developments around software tools to help health professionals have the greatest possible information available to them whenever they make decisions which may have an impact on patient safety.
In addition, the Virtual Physiological Human is a network of researchers in the fields of bio-informatics, genomics, and neuro-informatics to help create a new generation of e-health systems to assist them in disease prevention, diagnoses and treatment.
Other new projects include AP@home, Bravehealth, iCARDEA, ICT4Depressin and interstress.