QuickAdvice: Dragon Search Goes Medical
Dragon Medical Mobile Search (Free) by Nuance Communications is the third in Nuance's series of iPhone applications, this time aiming strictly at the medical field. Those that are in the medicinal field can appreciate Nuance's mobile medical search.
When the app is first launch, you'll have to accept the user agreement (I've attached an important part of the terms that you may want to take a look at in the screenshots) before you can do anything. Basically, Nuance can collect and use the Speech Data in this app to help enhance the speech recognition in this service as well as others.
Once you accept the agreement, you can optionally register your copy of the app as well, providing your name and email, and some information about your profession in the field (though these are completely optional and I skipped them, since I'm not in the field).
Now that we're past these required steps, it's time to put Nuance's well-acclaimed dictation service to work. Simply tap and speak a medical term into the app. It will automatically detect when you are done talking, and begin fetching results. This screen will also contain the latest search history at the bottom, with an option to clear.
Dragon Medical Mobile will pull up results from several popular sources for medicinal info: Google, Medscape, IMO, Drugs.mobi, and Medline. You can access stuff like drug-to-drug interaction information, medications, ICD-9 code lookups, and anything else medical related. You can scroll through these sources with the horizonal tool bar at the top. If a search query isn't correct, you can also tweak it until you get the right results.
Links can be viewed directly on the screen, with more browser-like options when viewing Google results. For Google results, you can also open in Safari or copy the link.
I found that the speech recognition is pretty spot on most of the time, although it seems to have some difficulty with differentiating letter sounds that are similar, such as 'b' and 'p' and 'v'. So for terms like that, unless you can get it perfectly, it may take several tries before it will finally recognize what you're actually looking for. But for everything else, the result should be accurate and instant.
Once again, Nuance Communications has another excellent app on their hands, although this one is much more narrowly tailored. But if you're working in the medicinal field and want something to aid you on-the-fly with great speech recognition, then this is definitely a great choice. It's simply a great pocket companion for you while on the job in case you need to reference something or get a refresher on a condition.
This is pretty much the same as Dragon Search, except for medical info. Nuance Communications claims that this app is free for a limited time only, despite their other apps being free since the beginning.
Who knows how long this app will remain free, so if you need it, grab it now!
