Besides being a way to increase medication adherence, identifying pills on the fly could ensure patients don’t encounter unwanted side effects or somehow ingest the wrong medication. But the data play here is much bigger: Indexing the world’s pill supply.

Optical character recognition and image recognition have spawned all sorts of amazing mobile apps. They can help users identify trees in the forest, identify business cards, and even measure heart rate. Now one new iPhone product, MedSnap ID, could change the way pharmacies are run by allowing for the instant identification of pills via phone camera.

MedSnap’s product can help reduce the tens of thousands of patient deaths from accidental drug interactions annually, and save pharmacies and health care providers a ton by cutting down on wasted manpower from slower traditional medication history management tools.

Users place a set of pills on a special tray or a clear imaging service, take a picture with MedSnap, and the product’s algorithms identify the pills from 60 images used for machine indexing.

Pills are identified through a combination of imprint recognition (the characters or logo on the pill) and visual characteristics (size, color, density, etc.). Apart from the company’s current database–which is primarily centered on drugs available in the United States–users can add to what the company calls the Pill Mapping Project, an effort to “index the world’s prescription drug supply so that it can be ready by a technology using a smart phone in a healthcare, patient, or caregiver environment.”

Identifying pills in medical settings is important, if only for the fact that an overworked, inattentive, or distracted medical professional can endanger lives by handing the wrong medication to the wrong person. Medical institutions currently use a host of proprietary products to identify pills, many of which require trips back and forth to a computer terminal. Apart from wasting time and money for the health care provider, this also ironically increases chances of a pharmacist being distracted.

See on www.fastcolabs.com