PatientCare: Patient Assistive Tool with Automatic Hand-written Prescription Reader

Abstract

Most people in the world prefer to be conscious of the medications prescribed by physicians. Especially, the importance of handwritten prescriptions is prodigious in Sri Lanka because they are widely used in the healthcare sector. However, due to the illegible handwriting and the medical abbreviations of the physicians, patients are unable to find the prescribed medication information. This research is an attempt to assist the patients in identifying the prescribed medicine information and minimizes misreading errors of medical prescriptions. When a patient uploads the image of a prescription, the system converts it into unstructured text data by using OCR and segmentation, then NER is used to categorize medical information from given text. According to the other research, some solutions exist in other domains for the above mechanisms. But they gave less accuracy when tried to apply for this research due to the domain specialty. Therefore, as a solution to overcome the above discrepancy this approach allows users to scan handwritten medical prescriptions and blood reports and obtain analyzed reports in medical history. Results have shown that this approach will give 64%-70% accuracy level in doctor's handwriting recognition and 95%-98% accuracy in medical information categorization of the prescription format.