At its recent annual "Google for India" conference, Google announced its development of new technology in collaboration with pharmacists to find translation of the doctors' handwriting.
During the Conference, Google noted that its experts had developed a new technique that would help dismantle handwritten and often unreadable prescription codes, which would make it easier for pharmacists to understand the content of such prescriptions and also enable ordinary people to learn about their content.
Doctors themselves often testify, albeit informally, as having the worst handwriting in the world, especially when giving their patients unread prescriptions.
Google indicated that the feature would work with Google Lens' smartphone technology, with which the user would be able to take a photo of the prescription, or view a photo of it from the photo library of their device, after which the names of the drugs mentioned in the prescription or medical report would appear.
The company issued a statement saying "This will be an auxiliary technique for digitizing handwritten medical documents, by increasing the number of people in the loop such as pharmacists, but no decision will be made solely on the basis of the outputs provided by this technique".
The developers explained that this new technology will contribute to digitizing prescriptions or handwritten medical reports, warning that pharmacists or doctors should not make their decisions to administer medicines to the patient based on the new features before checking the prescriptions thoroughly as well.
At Google's annual event in India, the company announced that it was also working on a single, standardized model that would cover more than 100 Indian regional languages for speech and text, which would enable users from the South Asian market.
According to Google, the new technique will be able to handle many of India's current languages, as well as many future global languages.
Mistakes in reading these prescriptions by pharmacists are serious matters that may endanger patients' lives. Google has not set any date for the launch of the new physician-line unwinding feature and is still in the trial phase.