Intelligent Platform for the Analysis of Drug Leaflets Using NLP Techniques

Abstract

Leaflets are one of the most straightforward methods for obtaining details regarding how to administer drugs, their composition, warnings, or precautions in their usage. However, they are many times cluttered with information, making them hard to understand by people. At the same time, the provided indications are frequently either too specific or too broad, thus making their understanding even more difficult. This paper presents the architecture and the prototype of an intelligent platform for drug administration with the following key functionalities: adding specific medications to user’s profile, searching for potential contraindications or side effects, and defining alerts of drug administration in the provided calendar, based on the physician’s prescription. The platform aggregates leaflets from two sources (Biofarm and HelpNet) using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques tailored for Romanian language and provides full-text search via Elasticsearch. A friendly mobile application, available for IOS and Android devices, as well as in web browsers, was developed to improve users’ healthcare and ensure self-education.