For those of you unfamiliar with Microsoft’s push to enter the healthcare field, take a look at HealthVault, a set of patient-friendly applications which allow families to organize and store their personal health information online.  The goal is to make health information easy to collect, easy to share and easy to update.  Make a list of your medications or track your caloric intake.  HealthVault does it all.  Today, the HealthVault SDK is used by a variety of providers, including big names like Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente, for things like monitoring blood glucose, tracking body fat and checking oxygen levels.

But that’s not all.  Microsoft hopes to get its Xbox 360 in on the game as well (pun intended).  According to a recent article by CNET,  Microsoft hopes to take advantage of the Xbox’s low price by having hospitals use it in place of their typical feed and filter electronic medical records equipment.  This information came straight from Microsoft Senior Researcher Desney Tan who spoke about plans to expand the HealthVault system at the Microsoft forum on healthcare technology in Beijing.

Xbox units could also be used to let patients play games or go online, possibly by body gestures enabled by Microsoft’s upcoming Project Natal control system. Microsoft Research is also developing applications that can plug into services such as HealthVault to make it easier for users to access their health records. One such project, MyLife for Windows Mobile phones, is using built-in devices such as cameras, accelerometers, and microphones in the hopes of enabling users to log various health readings, from blood pressure to body weight, and monitor activities from exercising to eating.

Maybe one day we will all be playing on Xbox 360s at the doctor’s office instead of filling out paper-based forms with a clipboard. You can stay on top of the latest at HealthVault and its medical partners by visiting their news section.  If you’ve used HealthVault or have a provider that does we’d love to hear your thoughts!