Smart biomedical waste management systems: Leveraging artificial intelligence for sustainable practices

Medical services have expanded significantly in this regard, leading to a rise in biomedical wastes that seriously endanger both the environment and public health. The challenges posed by inadequate structure, shortage of supply, and COVID-19 have further deteriorated the situation in India. The standards of practice, which are used in conjunction with an automated AI-based system to separate medical waste from other materials like PET, metal, paper, and glass, covered in this study. The AI-led system classifies the image texture features accurately to aid in categorization; the wastes go onto the correct streams for eventual recycling within a framework of a circular economy and help data-driven decisions. It has been noted that AI-based methods, in particular support vector machine classifiers, efficiently identify trash related to medicine, lowering the risk to the environment and obtaining high accuracy, demonstrating their effectiveness in anticipating the development of medical waste. These systems would greatly assist if incorporated into effective waste management planning and budgeting. Besides, robotics and automation, if utilized in handling biomedical waste, have drastically minimized human exposure to hazardous material and maximized efficiency in sorting the wastes. As healthcare services continue to increase, the role of AI in biomedical waste management is additionally very important and gives promising solutions to global waste management challenges.