Google is working on technology for handwriting recognition on doctors’ prescriptions

Google is working on a technique to recognize doctors’ handwriting on prescriptions and extract the correct diagnoses and medicines. The search giant has had technology for handwriting recognition for years, but this technique needs to work specifically on recipes.

The technology is still under development, a Google executive said at the Google for India keynote. The search giant showed a demonstration of the technique that retrieved the names of the three mentioned drugs from a prescription.

Google didn’t explain how the technique works, but presumably the software mainly tries to search for patterns that match medicines and diagnoses, which is a small fraction of the total number of words in a language. Subsequently, the software will more quickly recognize a found word as a medicine or diagnosis for a certain pattern, while it is not sure of this in the software currently used in Lens.

The technology is not yet ready, the CEO said during the presentation. It is unknown when that will be the case and in what way and for whom it will become available. Handwriting recognition is now done through Lens, but in the demonstration Google seemed to use a separate app.