Is The Xbox Good For Your Heart?

I know that a lot of people have touted the benefits of using the Nintendo Wii console since you have to actually get a little physically active to use it but now there is evidence that the Xbox 360 can be used to fight heart disease.

One smart scientist has come up with a way to use the console to help detect heart defects and prevent heart attacks.  In order to accomplish this, a modified chip was placed in the console so that it will display data about damaged cardiac cells so that doctors can spot problems like arrhythmia (which I actually have).

“This is a clever use of a processing chip … to speed up calculations of heart rhythm. What used to take hours can be calculated in seconds, without having to employ an extremely expensive, high-performance computer,” said Denis Noble, the director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University.

While it’s true that actually playing games isn’t linked to detecting heart problems, the scientist who developed this program had a unique background as a gaming software engineer which led to him creating a “little shooter game” for Microsoft which, ultimately, gave him the idea for this new use for the Xbox.

“These game consoles aren’t just glorified toys. [They] are pieces of very powerful computing hardware,” he says. “I can see this … being most useful for students and early-career scientists to just quickly and cheaply grab that extra bit of computing power they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get… I did a game-ified version of my old cardiac code. I could actually present some ‘proper’ science [based on] the cool things us game developers do.”

See?  The skills we develop playing video games really can be put to good use in a million other ways!