Xbox Gaming in South Africa

The games-kill-people lobby isn't going to like this one. Microsoft's e-health people are currently looking at ways to put the Xbox 360 to work in hospitals, according to a report on Yahoo.

Microsoft researchers are looking at how the company's Xbox 360 could be used in hospital rooms. Xbox units, which are cheaper than other hospital equipment but still have powerful hardware, are currently favored in a project on how to feed information from electronic medical records onto in-room display screens for patients, said Desney Tan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.

Researchers are also looking at how to automate the data transfer from complex records and choose or filter displayed information according to conditions such as whether the doctor or family members are in the room, which could be detected by sensors, Tan said. Xbox units could be used for those purposes, to present other health information and to let patients play games or access certain Internet services, including through body gestures enabled by Microsoft's upcoming Project Natal control system, he said.

And I'll make the obvious joke about managing Tourette's Syndrome with exposure to the Halo LIVE community.