The market for electronic health technology or eHealth is growing fast in the European Union. This is largely due to the unstoppable demand for mobile health devices which help patients to monitor their health, communicate with their doctors and store medical records. Meanwhile, the EU institutions are trying to speed up legislation to boost growth in the sector.

The demand for such services is expected to grow exponentially as the ageing baby boomers put increasing pressure on healthcare systems. It is estimated that nearly 30% of Europeans will be over 65 by the year 2050.

Many phone and TV companies across Europe are currently developing technologies to check your blood pressure and sugar level, and will remind you to take your medicine. This information is relayed over cable and satellite networks to users. KPN offers its diabeticStation in the Netherlands, Telecom Italia has the MyDoctor@home service, and Orange has a medication reminder solution. These services help to reduce the cost and time patients spend in hospital or at the doctor. In Belgium, Belgacom is testing a project for people with heart conditions, while Portugal Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have services for disabled people.

The eHealth industry has a critical role to play in the European Union

The driving bass rhythm of rap music can be harnessed to power a new type of miniature medical sensor designed to be implanted in the body.
Acoustic waves from music, particularly rap, were found to effectively recharge the pressure sensor. Such a device might ultimately help to treat people stricken with aneurisms or incontinence due to paralysis.
The heart of the sensor is a vibrating cantilever, a thin beam attached at one end like a miniature diving board. Music within a certain range of frequencies, from 200-500 hertz, causes the cantilever to vibrate, generating electricity and storing a charge in a capacitor, said Babak Ziaie, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering.
‘The music reaches the correct frequency only at certain times, for example, when there is a strong bass component,’ he said. ‘The acoustic energy from the music can pass through body tissue, causing the cantilever to vibrate.’
When the frequency falls outside of the proper range, the cantilever stops vibrating, automatically sending the electrical charge to the sensor, which takes a pressure reading and transmits data as radio signals. Because the frequency is continually changing according to the rhythm of a musical composition, the sensor can be induced to repeatedly alternate intervals of storing charge and transmitting data.
‘You would only need to do this for a couple of minutes every hour or so to monitor either blood pressure or pressure of urine in the bladder,’ Ziaie said. ‘It doesn’t take long to do the measurement.’
The device is an example of a microelectromechanical system, or MEMS, and was created in the Birck Nanotechnology Center at the university’s Discovery Park. The cantilever beam is made from a ceramic material called lead zirconate titanate, or PZT, which is piezoelectric, meaning it generates electricity when compressed. The sensor is about 2 centimeters long. Researchers tested the device in a water-filled balloon.
A receiver that picks up the data from the sensor could be placed several inches from the patient. Playing tones within a certain frequency range also can be used instead of music.
‘But a plain tone is a very annoying sound,’ Ziaie said. ‘We thought it would be novel and also more aesthetically pleasing to use music.’
Researchers experimented with four types of music: rap, blues, jazz and rock.
‘Rap is the best because it contains a lot of low frequency sound, notably the bass,’ Ziaie said.
The sensor is capable of monitoring pressure in the urinary bladder and in the sack of a blood vessel damaged by an aneurism. Such a technology could be used in a system for treating incontinence in people with paralysis by checking bladder pressure and stimulating the spinal cord to close the sphincter that controls urine flow from the bladder. More immediately, it could be used to diagnose incontinence. The conventional diagnostic method now is to insert a probe with a catheter, which must be in place for several hours while the patient remains at the hospital.
‘A wireless implantable device could be inserted and left in place, allowing the patient to go home while the pressure is monitored,’ Ziaie said.
The new technology offers potential benefits over conventional implantable devices, which either use batteries or receive power through a property called inductance, which uses coils on the device and an external transmitter. Both approaches have downsides. Batteries have to be replaced periodically, and data are difficult to retrieve from devices that use inductance; coils on the implanted device and an external receiver must be lined up precisely, and they can only be about a centimeter apart. Purdue University

A team of 18 researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa have found that treating high-risk, soft tissue sarcoma patients with a combination of implanted dendritic cells (immune system cells) and fractionated external beam radiation (EBRT) provided more than 50 percent of their trial patients with tumour-specific immune responses lasting from 11 to 42 weeks.
‘Sarcomas are relatively rare forms of cancer with about 10,000 new cases in the U.S. annually,’ said study co-author Dmitry Gabrilovich, M.D., Ph.D., senior member of the Moffitt Department of Immunology.
The authors note that because 50 percent of patients with large, high-grade soft tissue sarcomas develop distant metastasis, new, effective treatments are needed.
‘Unfortunately, conventional therapy for large, high-grade tumours is frequently systematically ineffective, making this a very deadly problem,’ Gabrilovich said.
According to the researchers, administration of dendritic cells has been found to be a promising method for producing an immune response because dendritic cells process antigen material and present it to other immune cells. Dendritic cells act as immune system messengers.
‘Many studies have shown that preoperative radiotherapy and surgery is effective in treating many soft tissue sarcomas with high-risk features,’ said Gabrilovich. ‘We designed our study to investigate the effect of combining the administration of dendritic cells and EBRT for patients with soft tissue, high-risk sarcomas.’
The researchers hypothesised that if dendritic cell implants were combined with EBRT (the most common kind of radiotherapy treatment that not only can kill tumour cells but release tumour antigens) the combination therapy might be complimentary when the dendritic cells helped process tumour antigens released by the EBRT treatment.
‘The combination treatment resulted in dramatic increases in immune T cells in the tumours,’ explained Gabrilovich. ‘The presence of T cells in the tumours positively correlated with the development of tumour-specific immune responses.’
An important finding in this study was that no patient had significant tumour specific immune responses before the combined therapy. After the combination treatment, tumour specific responses were observed in 52.9 percent of trial patients.
The researchers reported that the combination treatment was ‘well tolerated’ and that 12 of the 17 patients in the clinical trial were ‘progression free’ after one year.
The authors concluded that given that the combination therapy proved effective in creating a potent anti-tumor response and was safe, producing no adverse side effects, larger trials with greater numbers of patients were warranted. Moffitt Cancer Center