Google to come up with a solution to help people decode & translate doctors’ handwriting

way2barak, Dec.19: Often common people opine that doctor’s prescriptions are perhaps the most difficult to read and understand since they are illegible. Apart from chemists and pharmacists, commoners struggle to decipher a doctor’s handwriting on the prescription. Now Google is having a go at translating those unfathomable texts. The search giant announced at its annual conference in India on Monday that it is working with pharmacists to explore ways to decipher the handwriting of doctors.

Google has announced that it’s working to build artificial intelligence capabilities to assist with digitisation of doctors’ prescriptions. “We all know prescriptions are mostly handwritten, hard to read and even harder to remember,” said Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India. Once launched, the feature will identify medicines from a picture of the prescription taken with Google lens.

Google Lens is an AI-powered multipurpose object recognition tool that can be used to detect objects (such as products, plants, or animal species) and translate languages. The Google Len app can already be used to digitally transcribe handwritten notes, though in our own tests the feature was dependent on how legible said handwriting is. Harried doctors are known for having terrible handwriting.

The feature which will be rolled out on Google Lens will allow users to either take a picture of the prescription or upload one from the photo library. After the image gets processed, the app will detect and highlight the medicines mentioned in the note, a Google executive demonstrated during the conference.

There’s however, no detail yet on when the new text deciphering feature is expected to launch, only that “much work still remains to be done before this system is ready for the real world.”