A broken arm as a boy led Cosmin Mihaiu and some inventive colleagues to turn tedious physical rehabilitation exercises into a game that they hope can make it easier for people to recover from injuries.
The Romania-born software engineer demonstrated the game on Thursday at a TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada, showing how it can be played on Microsoft Corp’s motion-sensing video game platform Kinect for Xbox.
“We need to come up with solutions to get patients motivated to get better,” Mihaiu said. “No one likes treatment, but if we can make it in a way where people don’t think it is cumbersome, they will get better faster and save costs.”
Mihaiu and colleagues devised the software application to work with physical therapists to customize motion-control games to reward patients for doing prescribed movements.
The system, called MIRA (Medical Interactive Recovery Assistant), is currently designed for offline play in clinics. Its makers plan to create an online version that people could use at home, with performance data transmitted to therapists.
MIRA is being tried in clinics in Britain and Romania, with an annual subscription price of several thousand US dollars, Mihaiu said.
He said that there is a large market in the rehabilitation industry because unlike consumer-focused fitness games, medical games come with endorsement and follow-up by doctors, nurses or therapists.
Other game makers have caught on.
Ubisoft Corp early this month unveiled a tablet video game crafted as a prescription for a medical condition known as “lazy eye,” blending the worlds of play and treatment.
The France-based video game titan created Dig Rush in collaboration with US health technology start-up Amblyotech Inc, using treatment technology from innovators at McGill University in Canada.
The game targets amblyopia, a condition in which a person’s eye and brain are out of sync. It is reported to affect 3 percent of the global population.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
RSS