A new United States Patent Application filed by Microsoft noted on Slashdot seeks a patent on "avatar individualized by physical characteristic." This covers a number of aspects as outlined in the lengthy application, but as noted in the abstract, a lot of it focuses on health issues, weight in particular. This includes the possibility that gaming time would be budgeted for those deemed overweight, outlining what seem like intrusive methods for making this determination:

An avatar generator for a virtual environment reflects a physiological characteristic of the user, injecting a degree of reality into the capabilities or appearance. Thereby, many of the incentives of the real world are replicated in a virtual environment. Physiological data that reflect a degree of health of the real person can be linked to rewards of capabilities of a gaming avatar, an amount of time budgeted to play, or a visible indication. Thereby, people are encouraged to exercise. Physiological data that reflect the health and perhaps also mood also improve social interaction in virtual environments. People seeking to meet and become acquainted with particular types of people are not thwarted by the artificiality of avatars. The physiological data can be gleaned from a third party health data collection repository, a healthcare smart card, a real-time physiological sensor (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, blood glucose, peak flow, pedometer, etc.)