Doctors playing video games? Patients healing with achievements? Those are just a few of the ways Kinect and Microsoft are empowering health care in ways we never dreamed just a few years ago, giving physical therapy patients new exercises and motivation to continue, and offering surgeons a way to access information in the operating room and not need to scrub their hands again. You may have seen the Microsoft Super Bowl ad spot highlighting this and many other ways we’re changing the world by empowering technology, like eye tracking through Windows 8. If you missed it, check it out:
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If Kinect can empower physical therapy, surgeries, and space exploration, what problems can your business solve with NUI?
Keeping It Clean: Kinect in the Operating Room
A question that has long plagued operating rooms is how can surgeons access information and x-rays during surgery and remain sterile? Not long after Kinect debuted for the Xbox 360 in 2010, scientists at Microsoft Research in Cambridge immediately began exploring solutions.
Helena Mentis and her team came up with an entirely new way to use Kinect: hands-free, sterile access to information during surgery. Their research lead to widespread deployment of Kinect for Windows in operating rooms across the UK, giving surgeons access to information without the need to touch anything, keeping their hands sterile during surgeries. It also speeds up the time required to access information because prior to Kinect, surgeons had to dictate to assistants exactly what part of an image they wanted to see or change.
Healing Stroke Victims with Kinect
Stroke victims require a complex routine involving both physical and mental rehabilitation, so success can be greatly influenced by patient participation: 65 percent of stroke victims fail to follow their routines. How then do you get a patient to participate at a higher rate, while still following the physical and mental checklist? Kinect has been used as part of physical therapy routines for a couple of years now, but one Montreal-based company, Jintronix, has applied this principle to an entirely new area of physical therapy: rehabilitating stroke victims by encouraging patient participation.
Jintronix and Microsoft Research’s solution was to create interactive games with Kinect for Windows designed specifically to repair the neural pathways damaged in the stroke. The exercise, “Fish Frenzy,” requires victims to guide a fish on its underwater search for food. By gamifying the process and bringing the physical and mental rehab methods under one umbrella, Jintronix is in the process of bringing major disruptive change to this important field. In fact, beta units have already started to appear in clinics in Seattle and Montreal.
Kinect for Windows: What Do You Need to Solve?
What these medical case studies have in common is the need to solve a problem, and the means of bringing something new and disruptive to bear on that problem. How can Kinect for Windows change how you do business? It depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. Every business can be more efficient or more relevant to its customers, or do something revolutionary.
We can’t identify the problem for you, but the solution may very well be a disruptive technology such as Kinect for Windows. Tell us how you’d use Kinect to innovate, lead, and revolutionize at your organization in the comments below.