Romanian professor invents app that translates legal and medical jargon to plain language

Have you ever found yourself in the position of not understanding legal or medical papers? What if there was an app that would do just that?

Romanian professor Cosmin Munteanu who currently teaches at the University of Toronto has created such an app that will help people understand documents written in a medical and legal jargon.

The professor is creating the app with the help of a team of UX design students which study at the Faculty of Information and together with a startup called Skritswap.

Munteanu said that “The idea is to provide a tool that will sort of translate the text into something a bit more accessible. The parallel would be Google translate, but this is from English to English”.

The professor believes that the app will be very useful for the elderly. His idea came up while he was working with a student who was researching how older adults struggle to understand online health information. The study found that medical doctors were not explaining clearly medical problems to patients and for this reason they were going online to read medical journals, such as the British medical journal, however they were not able to understand them.

This type of documents have a very high level language and older adults may not be able to understand everything. The professor already created a prototype by combining AI and human power. Users will be able to access original documents as well as a translation document.

source: mississauga.com