Demist for medical students
Medical lectures move at the speed of someone who already knows the vocabulary. Miss one term and the next ten minutes are built on something you did not catch.
What it does during a medical lecture
Demist transcribes as your lecturer speaks, picks out the terms you are unlikely to know at your year of study, and puts a one-sentence explanation on screen while they are still talking. You keep listening instead of writing down a word to look up later.
Afterwards you have the full transcript, a glossary of every term that came up, a summary, and flashcards scheduled by spaced repetition so you revise something shortly before you would have forgotten it.
The kind of medical terminology it explains
Purkinje fibres
Specialised cardiac muscle fibres that carry the electrical impulse from the atrioventricular node through the ventricles, so both ventricles contract together.
Phagocytosis
The process by which a cell such as a macrophage or neutrophil engulfs a particle or microorganism and digests it inside a vesicle.
Sarcoplasmic reticulum
The calcium store inside a muscle cell; releasing that calcium is what triggers contraction, and pumping it back is what allows relaxation.
Erythropoietin
A hormone released by the kidneys in response to low oxygen, which tells the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells.
Myocardium
The muscular middle layer of the heart wall, between the endocardium and the epicardium, and the part that actually does the pumping.
Explanations are written for your year of study and the subject you set up, so a first year and a finalist get different levels of detail for the same word.
Recording in a clinical setting
Demist is for lectures, not for placements or patient contact. Nothing in it is designed to be used where a patient could be recorded, and your medical school will have its own rules on recording teaching. Check them before you record anything.
Where your lecture audio goes
In the Windows app, live recording is transcribed, and its terms detected and explained, by software running on your own machine, so the audio of a live lecture never leaves your computer. The iPhone app turns speech into text on the phone too, and sends only the words it explains, with their sentence. Your transcript and glossary sync to your account so you can see them on the web and keep your history if you reinstall.
The browser version works differently: it sends the audio to our server to be transcribed, and sends the terms it picks out to be explained. So does uploading a recording, in any version. The privacy policy sets out exactly what goes where.
What it costs
Live explanations, translation, your glossary and your flashcards are free, with no advertising. Recording is free and unlimited in the Windows and iPhone apps; in the browser, free accounts get three recordings. Free accounts keep lecture history for seven days. Demist Pro keeps your whole term, records in the browser with no limit, and adds unlimited summaries and Anki export for £4.99 a month. New accounts get Pro free for their first 30 days, with no card.
Built for students who find lectures harder to follow
Demist exists for medical students who are deaf or hard of hearing, who have dyslexia or ADHD, or who are studying in English as an additional language. If that is you, it is worth trying for one lecture.