An app that could potentially save lives by reducing medication errors has put QIU’s name in lights once again, thanks to the brilliance of three School of Computing students!
Yap Joon Lok (Bachelor of Computer Science), Lim Jia Jie (Bachelor of Information Technology), and Ng Wei Jie (Diploma in Information Technology) are the latest to join our hall of heroes, after they won second place in 2022’s TheGreatLab (TGL) Design challenge.
Their invention—the “Intelligent Drug Care App with Image Classification and Object Detection” was judged to be one of the outstanding entries of the nationwide challenge.
As always, the competition was tough, as the trio had to overcome challenges from six tertiary institutions, including Universiti Malaya and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
TheGreatLab (TGL) Design challenge is an innovation competition for tertiary education students studying in public and private education institutions in Malaysia—and Malaysian students studying abroad. It invites them to develop their own ideas into Proof of Concept (PoC) by solving specific industry problems and challenges.
So what challenges did our inventors address? Their mobile application allows users to identify medication by simply taking a picture of the pill or packaging. A robust image recognition model will then identify the object and display its information.
In their own words, “Wrongly-consumed medication may lead to adverse health effects. This mistake may be caused by human error, incorrect prescriptions, misplaced medications, misleading labelling, or a simple lack of understanding and proper precaution.“
“Therefore, everyone needs to be given reliable access to accurate information about their medications. This is when deep learning techniques can be used to identify pills or packaging and provide information from reliable sources.”
The project also offers the following features:
- A drug recognition system that implements different modes of object recognition which can recognize and identify an object.
- Incorporates language options which are familiar to Malaysians.
- Includes a reminder mechanism that assists users in taking their medications at the right time with the correct dosage
- A bookmark feature that allows users to save their results for future reference.
How impressive is that? To us, it seems like an incredibly well-considered invention that could solve a serious problem, and crucially save lives!
Well done to the trio and their supervisor, School of Computing lecturer Ms Leong Ying Mei! Congratulations and keep striving for greatness!
