"Vesti-Altai": a master's student at IMIT of Altai State University developed a voice assistant for doctors

Roman Klimenko, a master's student at the Institute of Mathematics and Information Technologies of Altai State University Roman Klimenko has developed a voice assistant, which is being tested at the “Territory of Health” rehabilitation center. It aims to save time for doctors when filling out medical records and allow them to pay more attention to patients.

President Vladimir Putin instructed state-owned companies to switch to domestic software by the beginning of 2025. Their development is encouraged financially – particularly in Altai Krai, five IT companies received governor’s grant support last year. One of the projects is already being tested by Altai doctors. Vesti correspondents looked into how competitive domestic software is.

Roman Klimenko did not reinvent the wheel, but used already known technology – a neural network that converts speech into text. A similar one underlies the Voice2Med service (a development of the Sber Health platform) which Russian doctors have been testing for several years.

“What sets our development apart is its use of our facilities, ensuring that patients’ data is not transmitted outside. If you transfer data to Voice2Med Sberbank, then all your anamnesis is stored, accordingly, in Sberbank. while our data is stored in the regional medical information system,” explains Roman.

Technologies based on artificial intelligence still cause skepticism in the medical community. First of all, text recognition. Roman integrates medical speech dictionaries of different specializations into his program: radiology, endoscopy, therapy.

The smart program, created by the Altai State University graduate student, recognizes professional terms for knee joint injuries. According to expert opinion, the specialized vocabulary was deciphered correctly by 98%. In this description, the doctor can just add commas and copy it into the electronic medical record.

Medicine, industry, and culture are interested in developing domestic software. And Russian services are already replacing foreign ones for solving specific problems.

Developments should be of applied nature and contain one of the end-to-end digital technologies (artificial intelligence, robotics, augmented reality). This year the customers of domestic software might also be encouraged. The Ministry of Digital Development is now working out regulations for state support.