If you’re sometimes unsure which pill you’re supposed to be taking, help might be at hand. A researcher from the National Institutes of Health is developing an app that can tell apart your drugs using a simple smartphone snap.
While you can use sites like the aptly named drugs.com to distinguish between pills, it’s a bit of a pain in the arse: you have to type in a thorough description of the tablets to get an answer, and amateurs can get it wrong.
Instead, Jesus Caban has developed image-analysis software that can work out the shape, colour and imprint of a pill from its image, reports New Scientist. It then compares those features to a database and spits out an answer. At the moment, it achieves a slightly worrying 91 per cent hit rate.
But don’t worry! It’s improving all the time. The biggest problem being that at the moment the software struggles to identify pills from award angles — but that’s something that can be improved upon. When it’s working well, that’s going to one hella useful app — both at home and in the hospital. [New Scientist]
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