Microsoft e-health research taps Xbox, mobile phones

IDG News Service - Microsoft is researching how gadgets like the company's Xbox game machine, surface computers and accelerometers in mobile phones could be used to improve health care.

Some of the applications from Microsoft Research, the software giant's lab branch, plug into existing Microsoft products like HealthVault, a Web service for patients to track their own health records.

One of those projects, an application called MyLife for Windows Mobile phones, could help a user log health metrics like blood pressure and weight, and monitor daily activities including exercise, walking and eating. Ongoing work on the application could allow it to help personal logs using built-in devices on a phone like its camera, its accelerometer and its microphone.

The "dream" is that a user could photograph each meal with their phone to have the application return data such as caloric content, food group and allergy information for each item on a plate, said Eric Chang, director of technology strategy at Microsoft Research Asia, in an interview. To make that easier, a phone could also get the information by scanning a tag attached to a meal, he said.

Accelerometers, which are increasingly built into phones to sense how they tilt, can detect how people sway while they walk, which lets MyLife count the steps a user takes each day, Chang said. The app does not yet use the microphones found in all mobile phones but could do so to gain additional information about a user's activities and surroundings, he said.

One challenge for such an app is keeping the demands on a user low. Taking a picture of each meal could be cumbersome, but where possible the app could minimize active user input by using information that the phone already has, such as a user's day calendar or data from linked-up wireless sensors, Chang said. Data from the app can be uploaded to Microsoft's HealthVault for the user to store and track.

MyLife plays into a larger goal of putting more personal medical data into the hands of patients, a flip from how most of that data today is stored in hospitals, Chang said.

"I think that's really going to allow us to have personalized medicine," he said.

Microsoft is one of many companies working on mobile health tools, said Christine Chang, an analyst at Ovum. The data will be extremely useful for physicians and researchers, but obstacles include cost, since smartphones and their data plans cost more, and making sure the data is correct, she said.

HealthVault could have a positive effect on health care too, but it faces a rival in Google Health and the two companies may have to work together to make the market work, Ovum's Chang said.