How Xbox 360 can save lives
We all know that video games are therapeutic to some of us. Shooting down airplanes during World War II or playing some virtual bowling soothes the savage beast, right? And likewise, our console systems are now at the center of our entertainment universe, offering games, television and movies to keep us occupied for hours. But can home console systems serve an even greater purpose beyond those distractions? According to an Associated Press report, home consoles can be used to detect heart defects and what happens when a black hole collides with a star. Amazing.
A computer scientist at the University of Warwick in England is using the Xbox 360 to detect heart defects and helping prevent heart attacks using some custom designed software and the Xbox 360. Revealed in the August edition of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry, this system was created by scientist Simon Scarle, whose connection to the video game industry is more than tenous. The software being used to do this is based on software he developed when he worked in the Rare video game unit of Microsoft as an engineer.
Besides developing the software, Scarle modified the graphics chip in the 360 so it could deliver data tracking for electrical signals moving in the heart around damaged cardiac cells. This method allows doctors to identify arrhythmia, a disturbance in the normal rhythm of the heart which causes it to pump blood less effectively.
Besides being a clever use of the Xbox 360 hardware, Scarle’s little experimental invention has other benefits; it is a lot cheaper than the method currently used: super computers. To create a heart model presently, researchers must use supercomputers or a network of PCs to process millions of mathematical equations related to the proteins, cells and heart tissues, which is a time consuming expensive process. Scarle’s Xbox invention can deliver those results, five times faster than current methods and at a cost that is 10 times cheaper, according to the study.
But Scarle is not alone in his use of home consoles for scientific research The Xbox 360 isn’t the only video-game console that is being used for scientific research. At the University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth, Mass., scientists and researchers are using the Sony PlayStation 3 to simulate black-hole collisions. This allows them to simulate what might happen when a black hole swallows a star. And of course, we can’t forget Sony’s support of the Folding @ Home project, which is also helping provide massive number crunching processing power through networked PS3’s sharing the burden around the world.
Incredible stuff.
