The tech giant says it is working on a technique that can automatically recognize the handwriting on doctor’s notes to extract the diagnoses and prescribed medicines.
Doctor’s handwriting is known for its illegibility, but Google sees this as a challenge. So the company now wants to decipher doctors’ notes automatically with new technology. Google said this during a keynote at the Google for India conference.
In a demonstration, an AI extracted three medicines from a prescription. According to Google, this is still a technology that is in full development.
The company does not say how it works either. Still, it presumably takes advantage of the fact that medical terms and brand names of medicines form a relatively small part of a language’s vocabulary. An AI could therefore look for patterns that it checks against an existing word list.
Google has long offered handwriting recognition via its Lens app, which mainly works for ‘readable’ handwriting. However, this technology seems to be happening with another app.
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