Can AI-Powered Smart Glasses Help Spot Medication Errors?
Every day, medication errors result in fatalities due to incorrect medication or improper dosages. Researchers at the University of Washington are exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to mitigate this issue. Dr. Kelly Michaelsen, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine, questioned whether AI could help identify errors after reading studies on medication mistakes among anesthesiologists.
“I was like, ‘This seems like something that shouldn’t be too hard for AI to do,'” Michaelsen said. Most medications used are among a common set of 10-20 drugs, suggesting that an AI system could be trained to recognize them and serve as a secondary check. Her research focused on vial swap errors, which account for 20% of medication mistakes. These errors occur when the wrong vial is selected or a syringe is mislabeled, resulting in incorrect medication administration.
Michaelsen proposed using “smart eyewear” – AI-powered cameras integrated into protective eyeglasses worn by medical staff during operations. Collaborating with computer science colleagues, she developed a system that scans the environment for syringe and vial labels, reads them, and verifies their accuracy. The study, not funded by AI companies, demonstrated that the device detected vial swap errors with 99.6% accuracy.
