Health & Medicine

Whenever she needed to do an eye examination, seamstress Ana do Nascimento used to wake up before sunrise, take a bus that took two hours to get to downtown Goiânia and spend the entire morning in a public hospital. Today, thanks to ICT, the “examination day” is no more than 30 minutes.

90% of the world’s 50 million epilepsy sufferers live in developing countries and a large minority need surgery as the only effective treatment. Thanks to the power of high-capacity R&E networks, the outlook for millions of epilepsy sufferers is being dramatically transformed and the costs of treatment substantially reduced.

For more than a decade, the Telemedicine Development Center of Asia based at Kyushu University Hospital in Fukuoka, Japan has facilitated remote training of surgeons, sharing of knowledge and the spread of best practice across the Asia-Pacific region, and more recently globally.

Collaborations for Dengue Fever and Chikungunya initiatives are excellent examples of the scalable nature of efforts to build communities. As such, the tools and capabilities are easily adaptable to the plethora of infectious diseases that pose a global challenge.

A groundbreaking human-brain atlas, the extraordinary result of a Canadian-German collaboration, is considered so revolutionary that it was recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s breakthrough technologies of 2014.

Faster access to genomics data aids researchers collaborating to find better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent cancer, as well those working to develop new plant varieties resistant to pests, floods and drought.

The rise in obesity – and particularly child obesity – poses a serious public health challenge. Approximately one in four children in England are now overweight or obese by school entry, rising to a third by the end of primary school. MD-Paedigree is a four-year European Commission funded ICT project to help fight childhood obesity-related cardiovascular and other child diseases.

Thanks to the Mylims platform, scientists around the world are able to process and manipulate data, interpret results and compare them with spectra obtained by other users and those stored in databases, thus accelerating the understanding of compounds. Mylims has already led to breakthroughs in the diagnosis of illnesses, such as leukaemia, and has become a valuable tool for food chemists to detect fraudulent coffee.