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A smart portable camera to prevent medical errors

To avoid possible errors in choosing which drugs to inject into patients, researchers have designed a small smart camera to alert doctors in the event of mishandling.

 

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of Washington in Seattle has developed the first-ever wearable camera that uses artificial intelligence to help prevent medication errors in hospitals. The goal of the device is to automatically detect medication misadministration in real time, before injection, to alert the clinician so they have time to intervene before the patient is put in danger.


A smart device to prevent medication errors


According to these researchers, the error rate for all medications administered in a hospital varies from one establishment to another by 5 to 10%. To solve this problem, which can sometimes lead to drama, they have designed a smart portable camera system, operating on the basis of algorithms analyzing the labels of medications selected by doctors. The first are specially dedicated to the transfer of a medication from a bottle to a syringe. This can concern a bad choice of bottle or even syringe exchanges. The difficulty of observation is all the greater since these elements fit in the hand and their labels can easily be hidden during their handling.


How does this AI-assisted camera work?


To develop their learning model, the researchers collected images using a small camera attached to doctors’ foreheads as they prepared their injections. Over 55 days of image capture, they collected a wealth of video footage from 13 anesthesiologists and 17 operating rooms across two hospitals. Then, across a total of 418 drug-draw events observed during routine patient care, the system achieved judgment accuracy of over 99 percent. Now that they’ve demonstrated the accuracy of their system, the next step is to integrate their camera into glasses that can instantly provide visual or auditory warnings to clinicians before they administer the wrong treatment to a patient.


It should be noted that their research was published in npj Digital Medicine. Each year, in the United States, more than a million patients suffer from adverse effects, more or less serious, linked to drugs that have been injected into them.

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