Many doctors rush while writing out prescription medications, making it practically impossible for their patients to understand what they’ve been given. This issue has persisted for years, which many tech companies, according to report, have not being able to find a solution.
Google is now working on an artificial intelligence model that can translate those sloppy texts by Doctors into something patients can read legibly, via TechCrunch.
At its annual conference in India on Monday, the Tech giant revealed that it has teamed together with pharmacists to develop a feature in Google Lens that can read those notoriously written medical notes.
The way it works is, the feature will allow users to either take a picture of the prescription or upload one from the photo library. Once the image is processed, the app detects the medicines mentioned in the note.
“This will act as an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology,” the company said in a statement
Talking about Assistive technology, Google, early this month, opened a new research and development centre solely for the purpose of making tech for people with disabilities.
The Tech Giant named the new facility “Accessibility Discovery Centre,” noting that it is a space where our engineers, researchers, product teams and partners can build new kinds of accessible technologies to remove more of the barriers that people with disabilities face every day.
Google did not disclosed when the Google Lens feature will roll out to the public, though it noted that India had the highest number of Google Lens users in the world.
A doctor’s handwriting can mean the difference between life and death for a patient, as sloppily written prescriptions can be misread or dosage wrongly interpreted.
Some reports claim that even pharmacists have a hard time understand what the Doctor has written.
The sloppy handwriting of a Doctor could result in the number of patients he or she has to attend to while on duty as a 2006 report by the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine, claims, “in the U.S. alone, doctors write about 3.2 billion prescriptions annually…”
