A team of British researchers at the University of Warick have found a new and interesting way of making use one of the world’s most popular gaming consoles to fight against heart disease. By using the “parallel processing” function, scientists are able to gain control of spare computing power even in the meantime gamers are indulging in their Xbox 360 games. Researchers believe the powerful graphics chip inside the Microsoft games console is ten times cheaper and five times faster than other forms of parallel processing hardware used to predict heart attacks.

Experts at the University of Warwick claim the Xbox-powered models could save more lives because the console’s power shortens the simulation to ‘minutes’ rather than hours, at a fraction of the price. The PC network of up to 12 machines used currently to make the same model costs at least £2,000 for just one high-end PC, while XBox consoles can now be snapped up for less than £200 on the high street.

“This is a highly effective way of carrying out high end parallel computing on ‘domestic’ hardware for cardiac simulations,” said Dr Simon Scarle in the University of Warwick’s WMG Digital Laboratory. “Although major reworking of any previous code framework is required, the Xbox 360 is a very easy platform to develop for and this cost can easily be outweighed by the benefits in gained computational power and speed, as well as the relative ease of visualization of the system.”

However, there are some downsides with his research. It is impossible to predict the rise of certain dangerous arrhythmias, as he has shown that cardiac cell models are affected by a specific limitation of computational systems known as the Halting problem.