WisconsInnovation

Here's a good example of tinkering a program's code to help do your job more effectively. Unfortunately, Microsoft's Kinect is not open sourced and therefore must be hacked in order to edit the code.

"Hacking Microsoft’s Kinect seems to be a worldwide fad right now, but this latest repurposing might be the most practical ever. A group of graduate engineering students at the University of Washington have hacked a Kinect so it can help doctors perform surgery.

University of Washington’s newspaper, The Daily, details the students' work, which involved writing new code for Microsoft’s Kinect that allowed it to interface with their robotic equipment and basically send feedback about a patient’s body position back through the system. Because of this tracking, the students were able to workout where important internal organs were and prevent the machines from cutting too deep.

“We could define basically a force field around, say, a liver,” said Howard Chizeck, University of Washington’s professor of electrical engineering. “If the surgeon got too close, he would run into that force field and it would protect the object he didn’t want to cut.”