Many doctors rush to write prescriptions for medicine, making it difficult for patients to comprehend what they wrote. This problem has existed for many decades. Several tech companies have tried to solve the issue but with little to no success, up until now at least.
Google has finally found a way to decode this unfathomable text. At its annual Indian conference today, the search engine giant revealed that it has been working with pharmacists in order to determine doctors’ handwriting.
Google Lens will roll out a feature that allows users to take a photo of their prescriptions or upload one from their photo library. A Google executive demonstrated that the app highlights and detects the medications mentioned in the note after the image has been processed.
The company stated that the technology 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.
Although the company did not immediately reveal when the new feature would start rolling out, it noted that India has the largest number of Google Lens users worldwide. This may be a hint that the rollout will start with India.
Google for India, the annual event of the company in South Asia, showcases many new developments for the region. Google for India also stated that it is developing a single, unified model that will cover more than 100 Indian languages for both speech and text.
India is a major market for Google with more than half a million users. It’s been difficult for Google in South Asia, where it was slapped twice in recent months by India’s antitrust regulator.
