Why your doctor could soon give you a video game prescription

Gaming has always been condemned for glorifying violence and spawning a culture of decadence in urban youth. It now seems like the detractors got it wrong; at least part of it. A number of recent studies show that video games can improve your physical fitness and even sharpen your vision.
According to a study carried at the University of Rochester, playing some first-person action video games, such as Unreal Tournament improves visual acuity. The study shows that the human brain adapts to the extremities of the game. In this way, the brain is “trained” resulting in a significant increase in spatial resolution of vision. For people who normally don’t play video games, they will be able to see smaller, crammed objects much more clearly. “When people play action games, they’re changing the brain’s pathway responsible for visual processing,” says Professor Daphne Bavalier, from the University of Rochester. In future, patients could be turning to video games to treat visual impairment problems or tackling aging of the brain.
In another remarkable observation, the hugely successful Nintendo game consoles could end up giving rise to “virtual athletes”. Nintendo offers plenty of active sporting games including tennis, golf, baseball and boxing. A great deal of physical activity is involved which includes moving the biceps, shoulders and legs; which is very much like the real deal. Kids who played these active games used more energy than those playing conventional sedentary games. Testament to this is the case of Mickey DeLorenzo, a 26-year old developer from South Philadelphia who lost 9lbs (4.09kgs) in a span of 12 days. Recent findings show that Nintendo tops the video games console market, outgunning its chief rivals by a solid margin. We hope that the massive numbers of sold units will bring a new wave of active sports gaming. Strange times we are living in. Who would have foreseen video games getting cozy with the Medical profession? Case in point is the impending venture of Sony PS3 in assisting medical research.

Talk and give instructions to your car, Strictly speaking

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just order your ride to play your favorite ballads, or simply give directions to your destination? This could be made possible without lifting a finger, or taking your eyes off the road. Unveiled at the CeBIT 2007 exhibition, is a BMW fitted with a futuristic multilingual human-computer dialogue system.
This is an exceptional dialogue interface, specially designed to exhibit conversational, intuitive traits as well as adapt to different user situations. The revolutionary technology has been developed by a team of researchers in part of a wider operation dubbed EU Project TALK. The team adopts the Information State Update (ISU) system. The approach is to develop versatile dialogue systems which are compatible with different languages, diverse application domains, and have the ability to implement most favorable system behavior based on human dialogue.
Project TALK kicked off operations in 2004, and has recorded significant progress to date. A great deal has been achieved in developing annotation, multimodality and multilingual capabilities, as well integrating them. BMW has already teamed up with the developers to produce in-car facilities that can respond to human speech. The project is still under development, though it has been successfully deployed in various systems and devices. This is the stuff of sci-fi flicks. We can’t say for sure when this technology will hit the mass market.

Mobile Clinical Assistant to connect health care staff to Information

At the ongoing CeBIT 2007 exhibition, Motion Computing showcased its new C5 Mobile Clinical Assistant (MCA). The device incorporates cutting edge technology from Intel® Health including patient data capture elements. These are designed to improve productivity and offer top-notch quality health care. The MCA can also help reduce workloads and dispensing errors; enabling clinicians spend more time taking care of patients. Moreover, combining expert advice from thousands of clinicians, it delivers accurate and reliable patient data information to the point of care. Prior to developing the device, intensive world-wide studies had been carried out involving health care professionals, patients, existing clinical information, systems and tools. During this time, it was revealed that clinicians needed a specialized device designed for them. It was then that Intel and Motion Computing joined forces to develop the MCA platform.
The C5 Tablet PC comes in a durable white casing, and has a unique ergonomic design. It also features a built-in handle. The casing can be sanitized to minimize spread of infections. Additionally, it is portable, weighing approximately 1.4 kg (3lbs).
Detailed product features and specifications:
• Processor: Intel® Centrino® Mobile Technology; Intel® Core Solo Processor U1400 (1.20GHz).
• Memory: 512 MB RAM (Upgradeable to a maximum of 1GB).
• Hard Drive: 30GB (with a 60GB option).
• Operating System: Windows® Vista™ Business/Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition
• Additional:
o Integrated security using biometric fingerprint reader and Radio frequency identification (RFID) reader for user & patient identification.
o Bar code reader for scanning to reduce medical dispensing errors.
o 2.0 MegaPixel Digital Camera for recording patient documentation and progress notes.
o Bluetooth and wireless connectivity to access electronic medical records.
• Accessories:
o C5 Docking station with battering charging bay.
o Additional pen.
o Compact USB Keyboard.
o DVD/R+W slim drive.
o Motion Media Pak software – provides handwriting recognition feature and reference tools for health professionals.
Devices like these are set to revamp the health care industry. MCA products will help curb medical inefficiencies and poor security features regarding patient confidentiality. The C5 will be shipped with a MSRP of $2,199.

Sony PS3 ventures into Distributed Computing to aid in Medical research

If you own a PlayStation®3 video game console, you have in your possession a potential supercomputer. You could also play an important role by joining a Stanford University research team to explore causes of incurable diseases such as Cancer, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases among others. In a press conference, Sony Computer Entertainment announces an important software update that will leverage the vast processing powers of PS3. The video game console implements a powerful Cell processor that is roughly 10 times faster than a standard chip in a PC. Sony hopes that PS3 owners will link their consoles to boost efforts of the academic research with their idle computing power.
The project, referred to as Folding@home program, is a distributed computing venture primarily involved in carrying out intensive research in protein folding, “misfolding” and study of incurable diseases. This is a very complex and demanding process. A typical PC would take ages to accomplish this. According to Vijay Pande, Director of the research project, a single PS3 console will perform Folding@home calculations between 20 and 30 times faster than a conventional PC. If millions of PS3 owners joined the project, the processing power would be astounding. Participants essentially download data from Stanford University via a distributed computing environment. The Folding@home application performs complex calculations and sends the data back to Stanford. The project is similar to Berkeley’s SETI@home, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence and heavily relies on personal computers. With multitudes of PS3s joining the party, millions of simulations will be possible and ultimately speed up the research process.
The PS3 software update will be available late March. PlayStation®3 users will take part by clicking on a Folding@home icon, or optionally set the application to run when the consoles are idle.

Cisco to acquire WebEx, and join the Saas bandwagon

Cisco systems, the leading computer networking supplier, announces plans to buy WebEx web-based company for $3.2 billion. WebEx is the undisputed king of web-conferencing services, and includes the powerful WebOffice application suite. The latter offers Calendar, Email and Spreadsheet programs. By acquiring WebEx, this can be interpreted as Cisco’s bold move to venture into the growing trend the of Saas (Software-as-a-Service) realm. At the same time, Cisco has invested heavily in developing intelligent networks for next-generation applications. In addition to these, Cisco has its MeetingPlace and Unified Communications products. It is now apparent that Cisco will combine its cutting edge Unified communications platform with its desktop collaboration packages. In the process, this will make it an influential Saas provider and a formidable competitor to Microsoft and Google. Microsoft may have a hard time adjusting to Saas, especially when its competitors can offer the services at no cost. Microsoft is able to provide unified communications and collaboration services, but the same cannot be said of Office applications.
Meanwhile, Cisco is aiming to expand the desktop collaboration applications to small and mid-sized markets. The best way to accomplish is via a web-hosted model.