He may just be a lad from Letterkenny, but paramedic Declan Watters hopes to simplify patient care with his AI-powered medications app.
If you’ve ever helped a sick family member, you’ll know the stress of remembering all their medications and what they’re for.
For paramedic Declan Watters, this kind of stress is multiplied when he’s called out to an emergency and he needs to make decisions about care quickly and safely.
It could be 3am, he tells SiliconRepublic.com, and you ask the sick person what medications they’re taking and they point to a big bag of tablets. Watters thought there must be a tool that can help in this situation so he decided to make it for himself.
MediSnap is an app that lets you scan medication packets and gives you important information about them instantly, including critical drug warnings and drug interaction alerts.
With the help of a silent partner, Watters has built an optical character recognition tool to convert the images to editable text that is then read by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool trained on a database he has created himself. This database is being updated all the time with information about different medications and their various brand names, he says.
Watters has a computer science degree and spent more than 20 years working for pharmacies as a warehouse manager before training to become a paramedic. He also worked as a vaccinator during the Covid-19 pandemic. With this background knowledge of pharmaceuticals and interest in helping people, Watters was well placed to spot this need.
And though he hasn’t had much call to use his degree in recent roles, the explosion of AI really piqued his interest, he says. He’s enjoyed getting back into the tech side of things.
The MediSnap app went live in a Beta version at the end of October and Watters has been blown away by the response. The website has been getting hits worldwide, including in the US, across Europe and South Africa.
“I’m just a boy from Letterkenny,” he says. “It’s been crazy.”
All this and he has spent just €15 on marketing so far (Facebook ads).
It really shows that this tool is needed, he thinks.
And the response from paramedics has been very positive, Watters says. He is particularly keen to highlight the value of their feedback and hopes to encourage more users to get in touch. He was up late the night before we talk to implement a feature that a user suggested – a dropdown menu to select a medication dosage.
An app for carers
But Watters doesn’t see this only as a tool for paramedics. He thinks it could be very useful to family members, carers, occupational therapists and healthcare assistants to allow them to keep track of medications. He notes that people who look after others are often very organised and will have everything in a list. His app will save images and generate an up-to-date list of medications as a pdf for users.
Given the sensitivity of this kind of data, Watters says that he can’t access people’s information. It will be saved on a user’s phone for future reference, he says, but he doesn’t have access to anything patient related.
His current focus is on the MediSnap professional version but he hopes to develop MediSnap home very soon.
As it stands, any version of the tool is for educational purposes only. When you log on, you see a disclaimer that it is not medical advice and that the user remains clinically responsible for all decisions. This is because the app does not yet have approval from the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA). Watter’s main goal is to achieve this as soon as possible and he’s confident he will.
After that, he hopes to bring it to the HSE, the NHS and anywhere else he can.
As a full-time paramedic and dad of two small children, it’s baffling how he finds the time. But his passion for the value of MediSnap is clear.
He’s currently looking for investment to further develop the app, hire programmers and gain regulatory approvals. He has been in touch with the local enterprise office in Donegal and plans to engage with Enterprise Ireland for support.
“The potential of [the app] to be exported all over the world, it’s crazy,” he says, “and we’re not competing with anyone else.”
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