Google wants more and more people to embrace digital technology. Their latest venture involves developing technology that can translate doctors’ prescriptions into readable text.

Often, a doctor’s writing can be illegible. Therefore, assistive technology that has the ability to turn such handwritten medical notes into readable texts with little help from humans such as pharmacists is desirable.

For this reason, the search giant announced that it is working with pharmacists to find a solution to the problem it experienced reading the prescription – an instruction written by a doctor that authorizes a patient to issue a drug or treatment. The announcement was made in the 8th year Google event for India.

Google already has the technology to interpret text from images but what makes reading a prescription difficult is its unstructured format in short. It is full of clues that only experts like pharmacists can decipher. However, Google’s new machine learning model, based on advanced artificial intelligence, claims it can identify and even highlight medications within handwritten prescriptions.

In the prototype, a Google executive demonstrated how anyone could simply take a picture of the prescription and upload it to the Google Lens app to process the information and highlight the drugs mentioned in the notes.

source: TechCrunch