Following the same notion that speech recognition technology vendors have had about medicine needing customized electronic dictionaries to handle the specialized vocabulary, a British company is bringing medical terminology to texting and mobile typing – and positioning its product as a big money-saver.
KeyPoint Technologies, based in Glasgow, Scotland, this week introduced a set of industry-specific dictionaries for Android smartphones and tablets, including a medical version called Adaptxt Medical that contains a database of 15,000 specialized terms. Many of these words relate to anatomy, disease names and drug names.
The company estimates that the Adaptxt Medical app can save practices thousands of dollars per physician, based on the assumption that 10,000 of those terms do not appear in general dictionaries and that it takes 10 seconds to enter each word into a phone's vocabulary list to prevent embarrassing "autocorrect" errors. At a median hourly wage of $85.26 for a general practitioner in the US, the data entry and correction of errors amounts to $2,368.50 in lost productivity per primary care physician, according to KeyPoint, which has US headquarters in San Jose, Calif.
"It needs to be addressed," KeyPoint marketing VP Ronald Brown said of the autocorrect problem.
The medical app, like the other new vocabulary sets for legal, finance, business and general IT professionals, applies algorithms and artificial intelligence to pick up on each user's unique typing patterns and add words to that person's dictionary, Brown told MobiHealthNews.
KeyPoint Technologies makes Adaptxt dictionaries in 78 languages, including many with holiday and sports themes, that run on top of a free keyboard app. Each, including the industry-specific dictionaries, sells for 99 cents in the Google Play store.
Currently, KeyPoint only has apps for Android devices. "There's more flexibility with Android," Brown says. An Apple iOS keyboard app is in the works, and the company also is looking to develop BlackBerry and Windows Phone versions, though Brown would not say what stage of development those projects are in.
"Expect to see more in healthcare," Brown added, though he declined to share specifics.
