Why is my doctor playing halo?

When Redmond-based Microsoft came out with the kinect system last year they never thought that it would be the next medical break-through. That is what they did though as seen from all of the uses that doctors at the University of Washington along with other medical professionals have implemented that take the kinect into the classroom and even into the operating room.

Dr. Brain Ross, executive director of the Institute for Simulation and Inter-professional Studies (ISIS) at the UW, Has begun using xbox and kinect for teach medical students in the classrooms. He came up with the idea one day after watching his son using his xbox to play games with other players online. Using the technology he can now video-conference his classes to the various campuses and one day hopes to be able to work with game manufacturers to create a hospital simulation that would take full advantage of the kinect avatar technology.

"It's a really great product where there's a lot of opportunities to do a lot of things," says Howard Chizeck, an electrical engineering professor in the UW's Biorobotics Lab. "It's a very enabling device. It's the right thing at the right time."
Dr. Tom Lendvay, an assistant professor or urology at the University of Washington, came up with the idea of using the kinect as an alternative to the expensive simulators that hospitals normally use to help surgeons arm-up and keep sharp for surgery. The theory here is that using the xbox and kinect can help maintain your eye-hand coordination just as well as a surgical simulator and save thousands of dollars.
"If you can pay for a video game versus $100,000 for a simulator," Lendvay said, "that's all you need to know."
There is one hospital in Toronto, Canada that has started using the kinect to allow surgeons to view MRI scans without having leave the operating room. The idea behind this is that it means the surgeon can stay in the OR instead of spending time leaving to go pull up the scans, view them, re-scrub and then go back to the OR.
"Kinect gives us a really low-cost test bed for developing and testing the idea," Chizeck said.

Parents the next your son or daughter ask for an xbox with a kinect system you should keep in mind that it just might get them into medical school.