The write idea
- Article 1 of 26
- M-iD, October 2003
A digital pen tracks and records its own movements – making it possible to know what is written, when, and by whom.
It is the most advanced digital input screen ever developed. It offers high resolution, perfect contrast, and costs a fraction of a penny to produce. Any graphical interface can be printed on it, and people get years of full-time education, paid for by the government, to learn how to use it. It will not be beaten in our lifetime. It is, of course, paper.
It is also ubiquitous - as almost every organisation trying to improve efficiency and reduce costs knows. In spite of the dreams of the 1980s visionaries who forecast the imminent arrival of 'the paperless office', paper is still a mainstay of any business. It may be expensive to handle and store, it may not be searchable like a database, it may not integrate into back-office systems, and it may be difficult to edit the content it stores; but for all this, paper still remains far too useful, simple and cheap to be entirely replaced by computers
What businesses have needed is a way for the data-processing capabilities of computers to be added to pen and paper, without the complexity or expense of having to scan all their documents. And in spite of years of work on digital paper at research laboratories such as Xerox and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no-one has yet come up with a solution to that. Commercially, the best solution to date is probably the expensive and clunky Tablet PC.
But there is another approach, and it may be the one that finally begins to close the divide between paper and computers: the digital pen. This device is able to track and record its own movements, so that any handwriting is captured as digital coordinates. From there, it can be converted into handwriting, data or text.
Ready and waiting
“We identified the technology as being potentially important quite some time ago. But there have been a number of developments recently that have revised upwards our opinion of its importance,” explains Ceri Carlill, a partner at Accenture Labs, in Sophia Antipolis, France. “We feel the technology is ready for the enterprise market.”
Carlill argues that although there are a number of competing technologies, the emergence of a Swedish company called Anoto as the technological leader in this nascent market will make the digital pen attractive for a huge variety of applications. Its pens have one big advantage over those of its competitors: they know where they are on the paper, as well as what they are writing, making them extremely useful for form-filling, among other tasks.
“Before we invested heavily in the technology, we looked at all the different types out there, like accelerometer pens (see box, How digital pens work),” concurs Peter Burtwistle, managing director of Glasgow-based systems integrator and Anoto-reseller Sysnet. “But the key thing about Anoto functionality is that it has context. The pen knows where exactly on a piece of paper it is, but more importantly on what piece of paper. It knows whether it's on a form or on the pages of a notepad. And because it knows exactly where it is, you can take areas of that page and make it do things.” By this, he means that part of the page could, for example, be turned into a form capable of turning the pen-strokes into XML data.
Overcoming resistance
Roger Payne, head of the pervasive ICT (Information and Communications Technology) group at the emerging technologies lab of BT Exact, headed up a project to develop a digital pen called the SmartQuill, which has now been licensed to another company for release later this year.
Payne believes that the digital pen is both a good way to overcome resistance to technology and useful in situations with a high degree of interaction. “When I was working on the project, what we were trying to do was bring down that phobia of technology that some people have. When you try to offer people services, sometimes giving them a mouse and keyboard is not the right interface.”
Sysnet's Burtwistle cites the example of Don Homes, a construction company whose sales team of mostly late middle-aged women have “a very good client manner, but aren't interested in technology”. They are interested, however, in getting half a million pounds out of a customer, “so they need good eye contact and a non-intrusive technology that can instantly send information to the back office.” Similarly, he believes that sales, financial services, and those working out in the field will be big adopters of the technology.
Accenture Labs is making a big play in healthcare. “There is a huge movement globally to electronic patient records. But the obstacle to that is the extent to which patient records are handwritten,” says Carlill. And, he might add, not just written, but also written hurriedly and badly.
Accenture has developed a proof-of-concept system for hospitals that illustrates the advantages of the digital pen for that environment. It is based around observation charts, which doctors and nurses use to record changes in patients' vital signs over time.
The big advantage of the system is that it lets doctors and nurses continue working as they always have - with pens and charts. The difference now is that pens are digital. The medical staff update the physical, paper chart, and this continues to be accessible to staff without a computer - usually at the foot of the patient's bed; but since the charts are printed on the micro-patterned paper required by the Anoto pen, the pen is also able to record the amendments made to the records and therefore to update the computerised patient record almost instantly. That means the data is instantaneously available to, for example, a doctor at remote location. Analytics and exception alerts - to tell the doctor that blood pressure is falling too fast, for example - make the doctor's job easier still.
An added benefit is that the uniqueness of the pattern used for each chart means that the system knows precisely whose chart is being updated, preventing mix-ups; it can also keep a record of when changes are made and by whose pens.
Carlill predicts that digital pens will be widely taken up within the next year. “I see it being adopted, if not in 2003, then over the next 12 months, certainly,” he says.
BT Exact's Payne agrees that the time of the digital pen is approaching soon, as a wave of vendors release new technology. “I could have sold them by the bucket-load. Everyone I've shown it to thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. They all saw applications for it in everyday life.”
What may stop the onrush of the digital pen is cost. At $200 or so for a pen (excluding Bluetooth- and GPRS-equipped mobile phone for mobile workers) the cost is not cheap. “If you've got 2,000 users on the road, that's quite a lot of money,” points out Burtwistle.
But with prices already falling, Burtwistle says that objections will also drop away. “There's always someone who has to go up ladders and do the physical work. They can't carry big expensive mobile phones, PDAs, or laptops. Pen and paper is how it's done.” Soon, that might be digital pen and paper.