Digitale Pen
In healthcare the Digital Pen is mightier than the iPad
Nov 11th
Health Business Article (Original)
It seems that everyone wants a piece of the Apple iPad action with sales reaching over seven million. Rupert Murdoch announced recently that it was a “game changer”, joining the PC, laptop and smartphone family of desirable computing gadgets. But questions are being raised about the iPad’s – and indeed tablet PCs in general – suitability for different industry sectors.
doctorsPetter Ericson, Chief Science Officer at Swedish technology company, Anoto AB, discusses the issues and examines whether such devices could become mainstream business tools in the healthcare and social care sectors.
It was interesting to read that as early as next year, hospitals in Victoria in London will start trialling the use of iPads. The real question though is whether the tablet form factor is appropriate or even practical enough for this type of tough and often unpredictable environment.
Looking at the positives, iPads are certainly lighter and more portable than laptop computers and more readable than smart phones; they also have a whole universe of ‘apps’ to make content and features easier to access; and the functionality is familiar to most of us so relatively straightforward to use.
So far so good, but then again most healthcare environments like hospital wards, treatment rooms and outpatient clinics, do not need immediate access to lots of web-based content, or the lure of revolutionary cutting edge design. On a more practical level, what about the threat of damage? For doctors and nurses, midwives and care workers, mobility could be a real concern – it is not just a question of where to put it, but the constant worry about dropping it, spilling fluids on it and damaging it. This has always been an issue for laptops and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), so it is unlikely to be any different for an iPad.
Then there is the issue of theft. iPads are desirable pieces of technology – not only are they expensive to replace, but also the information stored on them, such as sensitive patient data, could be invaluable, perhaps even life saving.
Paper still key medium for capturing data
In healthcare environments where paper is still the key medium for capturing information, there is a clear need for a more practical and low cost solution for capturing and transmitting data, particularly for a largely mobile workforce.
Digital Pen and Paper technology is continuing to win over many healthcare trusts, hospitals and care organisations by putting usability and simplicity over IT wizardry and cool design. It offers a simple but effective alternative to screen and keyboard and tablet PC solutions and can quickly capture, process, interpret and transmit information in real time.
Digital Pen and Paper automatically captures handwritten information in medical or care forms – such as physiotherapist treatment forms, midwives consultation notes or care workers’ visiting notes – and digitises that information, eliminating the need to manually type it up later.
The pen looks like a normal ballpoint pen with a tiny infrared camera at its tip, and stored data is synchronised via a docking station or mobile phone and Bluetooth with back-end systems, rather than remaining on the device itself. For healthcare workers, this means synching and backing up data to patient record systems and other repositories easily and quickly and eliminating the number of potential manual errors.
For those who require duplicate paper reports or documents for regulatory or administrative purposes, like social or care workers visiting family members, digital paper forms solutions provide the answer.
Unlike most technology, users require little or no training and can be up and running almost immediately. A Digital Pen is also practical and robust, extremely light and portable (it can easily fit into a pocket or bag) and because it looks like a normal pen is not typically a target for theft.
Practicality over aesthetics
When introducing new technology to critical health and social care services, the first consideration should always be the needs of the users and the underlying processes. Tablet PCs like iPads can be a valuable asset – they are mobile, highly functional and provide a great user experience in most situations.
For executives in the boardroom, there is little doubt that they can be a real benefit, but when it comes to more practical uses, especially in healthcare and social care environments, it is a different story. Adopting the latest cool technology may seem appealing, but the question remains whether it is relevant and appropriate – if not, it will almost certainly cause headaches further down the line.
Livescribe: The Pen That Never Forgets
Sep 19th
In the spring, Cincia Dervishaj was struggling with a take-home math quiz. It was testing her knowledge of exponential notation — translating numbers like “3.87 x 102” into a regular form. Dervishaj is a 13-year-old student at St. John’s Lutheran School in Staten Island, and like many students grappling with exponents, she got confused about where to place the decimal point. “I didn’t get them at all,” Dervishaj told me in June when I visited her math class, which was crowded with four-year-old Dell computers, plastic posters of geometry formulas and a big bowl of Lego bricks.
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Photograph by Benjamin Innes for The New York Times
The Education Issue
See all related articles in The New York Times Magazine.
Related
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A High School Student Reviews a Smartpen, the Livescribe Echo (August 19, 2010)
To refresh her memory, Dervishaj pulled out her math notebook. But her class notes were not great: she had copied several sample problems but hadn’t written a clear explanation of how exponents work.
She didn’t need to. Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.
Dervishaj showed me how it works, flipping to her page of notes on exponents and tapping a set of numbers in the middle of the page. Out of a tiny speaker in the thick, cigar-shaped pen, I could hear her teacher, Brian Licata, explaining that precise problem. “It’s like having your own little personal teacher there, with you at all times,” Dervishaj said.
Having a pen that listens, the students told me, has changed the class in curious ways. Some found the pens make class less stressful; because they don’t need to worry about missing something, they feel freer to listen to what Licata says. When they do take notes, the pen alters their writing style: instead of verbatim snippets of Licata’s instructions, they can write “key words” — essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream. Licata himself uses a Livescribe pen to provide the students with extra lessons. Sitting at home, he’ll draw out a complicated math problem while describing out loud how to solve it. Then he’ll upload the result to a class Web site. There his students will see Licata’s handwriting slowly fill the page while hearing his voice explaining what’s going on. If students have trouble remembering how to tackle that type of problem, these little videos — “pencasts” — are online 24 hours a day. All the students I spoke to said they watch them.
LIKE MOST PIECES of classroom technology, the pens cause plenty of digital-age hassles. They can crash. The software for loading students’ notes onto their computers or from there onto the Web can be finicky. And the pens work only with special notepaper that enables the pen to track where it’s writing; regular paper doesn’t work. (Most students buy notepads from Livescribe, though it’s possible to print the paper on a color printer.) There are also some unusual social side-effects. The presence of so many recording devices in the classroom creates a sort of panopticon — or panaudiocon, as it were. Dervishaj has found herself whispering to her seatmate, only to realize the pen was on, “so we’re like, whoa!” — their gossip has been recorded alongside her notes. Although you can pause a recording, there’s currently no way to selectively delete a few seconds of audio from the pen, so she’s forced to make a decision: Delete all the audio for that lesson, or keep it in and hope nobody else ever hears her private chatter. She usually deletes.
Nonetheless, Licata is a convert. As the students started working quietly on review problems, their pens making tiny “boop” noises as the students began or paused their recording, Licata pulled me aside to say the pens had “transformed” his class. Compact and bristling with energy, Licata is a self-professed geek; in his 10 years of teaching, he has seen plenty of classroom gadgets come and go, from Web-based collaboration software to pricey whiteboards that let children play with geometric figures the way they’d manipulate an iPhone screen. Most of these gewgaws don’t impress him. “Two or three times a year teachers whip out some new technology and use it, but it doesn’t do anything better and it’s never seen again,” he said.
But this time, he said, was different. This is because the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing. Livescribe first released the pen in 2008; Licata encountered it when a colleague brought his own to work. Intrigued, he persuaded Livescribe to donate 20 pens to the school to outfit his entire class. (The pens sell for around $129.) “I’ve made more gains with this class this year than I’ve made with any class,” he told me. In his evenings, Licata is pursuing a master’s degree in education; separately, he intends to study how the smart pens might affect the way students learn, write and think. “Two years ago I would have told you that note-taking is a lost art, that handwriting was a lost art,” he said. “But now I think handwriting is crucial.”
Yet most students are very bad at taking notes. Kiewra’s research has found that students record about a third of the critical information they hear in class. Why? Because note-taking is a surprisingly complex mental activity. It heavily taxes our “working memory” — the volume of information we can consciously hold in our heads and manipulate. Note-taking requires a student to listen to a teacher, pick out the most important points and summarize and record them, while trying not to lose the overall drift of the lecture. (The very best students do even more mental work: they blend what they’re hearing with material they already know and reframe the concepts in their own words.) Given how jampacked this task is, “transcription fluency” matters: the less you have to think about the way you’re recording notes, the better. When you’re taking notes, you want to be as fast and as automatic as possible.
The Education Issue
See all related articles in The New York Times Magazine.
Related
*
A High School Student Reviews a Smartpen, the Livescribe Echo (August 19, 2010)
All note-taking methods have downsides. Handwriting is the most common and easiest, but a lecturer speaks at 150 to 200 words per minute, while even the speediest high-school students write no more than 40 words per minute. The more you struggle to keep up, the more you’re focusing on the act of writing, not the act of paying attention.
Typing can be much faster. A skilled typist can manage 60 words a minute or more. And notes typed into a computer have other advantages: they can be quickly searched (unlike regular handwritten notes) and backed up or shared online with other students. They’re also neater and thus easier to review. But they come with other problems, not least of which is that typing can’t capture the diagrammatic notes that classes in math, engineering or biology often require. What’s more, while personal computers and laptops may be common in college, that isn’t the case in cash-strapped high schools. Laptops in class also bring a host of distractions — from Facebook to Twitter — that teachers loathe. And students today are rarely taught touch typing; some note-taking studies have found that students can be even slower at typing than at handwriting.
One of the most complete ways to document what is said in class is to make an audio record: all 150-plus words a minute can be captured with no mental effort on the part of the student. Kiewra’s research has found that audio can have a powerful effect on learning. In a 1991 experiment, he had four groups of students listen to a lecture. One group was allowed to listen once, another twice, the third three times and the fourth was free to scroll back and forth through the recording at will, listening to whatever snippets the students wanted to review. Those who relistened were increasingly likely to write down crucial “secondary” ideas — concepts in a lecture that add nuance to the main points but that we tend to miss when we’re focused on writing down the core ideas. And the students who were able to move in and out of the audio stream performed as well as those who listened to the lecture three times in a row. (Students who recorded more secondary ideas also scored higher in a later quiz.) But as anyone who has tried to scroll back and forth through an audio file has discovered, reviewing audio is frustrating and clumsy. Audio may be richer in detail, but it is not, like writing and typescript, skimmable.
TAKING NOTES HAS long posed a challenge in education. Decades of research has found a strong correlation between good notes and good grades: the more detailed and accurate your notes, the better you do in school. That’s partly because the act of taking notes forces you to pay closer attention. But what’s more important, according to some researchers, is that good notes provide a record: most of the benefits from notes come not from taking them but from reviewing them, because no matter how closely we pay attention, we forget things soon after we leave class. “We have feeble memories,” says Ken Kiewra, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska and one of the world’s leading researchers into note-taking
Het Parool: Intelligent Pen – Livescribe
Sep 15th
Het Parool (14 september 2010) : Een stijlvolle pen die notities direct omzet naar digitale documenten en ze veilig archiveert op uw pc. Tot voor kort kon dat alleen in James Bond-films. Nu brengt Litescribe hem op de markt. Een infraroodcamera, speciaal papier en een USB-stick zorgen ervoor dat je handschrift digitaal wordt opgeslagen op je computer. Daarnaast kan hij via de opnamefunctie geluidsopnamen maken tijdens vergaderingen. De Litescribe Echo is net iets groter dan een normale pen en beschikt over een verlicht oled-schermpje. Dankzij de USB-aansluiting kan hij aan de computer worden gekoppeld en functioneren in Photoshop.
Overige specificaties
Ingebouwde microfoon en luidspreker
Oordopjes met ingebouwde microfoons
4 of 8 GB opslagcapaciteit voor notities en presentaties
60 externe applicaties, zoals games
Digitale Pen bij Oki Led IT Tour 2010 in Aalsmeer
Sep 2nd
Op donderdag 9 september is de Oki LED IT Print Tour 2010 aanwezig bij Colour of Business aan de Witteweg 61 te Aalsmeer.
Demonstraties op het gebied van banner en labelprinting, opmaken van eigen documeneten en visitekaartjes en de unieke digitale pen kunt u tijdens de tour verwachten. De bus is aanwezig tot 1230. Kom even langs en laat u informeren over de digitale pen oplossingen van Anoto in combinatie met de OKI Printers.
Meer informatie op LinkedIn of Colour of Business
Nieuwe App Store voor de Livescribe Smartpen Toepassingen
Sep 1st
Als u nog nooit gehoord over de Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, het is een geweldige gadget waarmee u uw notities op te nemen op twee manieren – door het creëren van digitale kopieën van alles wat je schrijft met de hand en vast te leggen wat er is gezegd op hetzelfde moment. Wat maakt het nog nuttig is dat het verbindt de twee samen, zodat u snel toegang tot audio door te tikken op delen van uw notities. U kunt alles ook uploaden naar uw computer (Mac of PC) waar de Livescribe Desktop software archieven en uw notities volledig doorzoekbaar maakt en ook gedeeld kan worden met uw publiek als Pencasts.
En dat is niet alles! Livescribe heeft net een nieuwe App Store, waar u kunt kopen of gratis downloaden, extra toepassingen zoals een rekenmachine, vertalers, spelletjes en zelfs een piano of een gitaar waarmee je muziek kan maken op papier. Momenteel zijn er ongeveer 30 applicaties beschikbaar voor Onderwijs, games, muziek, entertainment, Utilities, Reference, Reizen, productiviteit en Sport. De prijzen variëren, maar heel laag zijn, kunnen de meeste van de apps worden gekocht voor $ 0,99 of een paar dollars.
De App Store model is zeer vergelijkbaar met de iPhone App Store en biedt ontwikkelaars met uitstekende mogelijkheden om extra geld te verdienen. Inkomstenverdeling is 65% aan de ontwikkelaar en 35% naar Livescribe
Oorspronkelijk bericht http://www.techtext.net/nl/gadgets-and-gizmos/new-app-store-for-livescribe-smartpen-applications.html
Digital pen system cuts paperwork for dent repair company
Aug 25th
By Matt Hamblen- Computer world
Carmedic uses digital pen and paper to transmit data wirelessly
Before 2009, technicians for Carmedic were filling out 80,000 invoices a year by hand. Today, they still fill out each invoice by hand, but they use digital pens and paper, which means that the invoice data is wirelessly sent to a central server in Illinois for processing.
The digital pen and paper system has vastly reduced the time for processing invoices and has cut down on handwriting errors and lost paperwork, said Dan Binkley, president of Carmedic in Roxana, Ill. The company has about 100 technician-partners in 20 states who travel to auto dealerships to repair dents and dings. They use a process called Paintless Dent Removal, which costs a fraction of the price of getting a dent fixed and painted at an auto body shop, Binkley said in an interview.
Before instituting the digital pen and paper system, all the paper generated from four-copy invoices was “causing serious logjams,” he said. Carmedic either had to hire more workers to sort through the invoices and record them or find a digital approach.
Inspectielijsten met digitale pen oplossing
Aug 3rd
Heel veel service organisaties (installatie, onderhoud, inspectie) werken nog steeds met papieren formulieren voor werkbonnen, offertes, inspectielijsten, urenverantwoordingen etc. Bij de klant wordt door de field engineer of inspecteur een uitgebreide papieren formulier ingevuld. Waarbij de klant vaak ook nog zijn handtekening op het formulier zet. Het origineel wordt aan de klant overhandigd, terwijl de kopie door de medewerker wordt beantwoord. Aan het einde van de dag of week worden de formulieren ingeleverd, gefaxt of per post verstuurd naar de backoffice voor verdere verwerking (update service management systeem, sturen offerte, bestellen onderdelen, urenverantwoording). Vaak worden ze overgetypt door de backoffice medewerker met alle mogelijke fouten.
Met moderne technieken als PDA, Laptop en ook digitale pennen is die informatie heel snel binnen te halen. Na het afronden van de werkzaamheden worden de formulieren (electronisch of papieren) direct verstuurd. Helaas blijkt de PDA of Laptop oplossing voor veel bedrijven een te kostbare, complexe investering en ingewikkelde oplossing. Een laptop of kleine PDA is niet handig als op hoogte of in vuile omgeving gewerkt wordt. Niet alle field engineers of inspecteurs hebben fijne vingers om een PDA te bedienen. Daarbij is het invullen van een inspectielijst niet sneller dan de traditionele papieren versie. Op de inspectielijst staan invul-, aankruisvakjes en velden voor het invullen van waarden.. Kunt u het formulier op een pda sneller invullen dan op papier?
De digitale pen oplossing biedt de voordelen van beide werelden: gemak en direct beschikbaar.
- Want de bon is nog steeds onmiddellijk beschikbaar,
- De medewerker hoeft niet meer getraind te worden want die kan gewoon met pen en papier blijven werken
- De inhoud van inspectielijst kan omgezet worden naar digitale teksten en gekoppeld worden aan back office systemen
- Minder hoge investering dan PDA of laptop
- Snelle bestelling, factuur, offerte, certificaat!
- En niet meer overtypen!!!
Voor technische details en video’s over deze oplossing klik hier
De volgende inspectielijst is een standaard voorbeeld. Het bestaat uit diverse invulvelden met open tekst velden en aankruisvelden. Een dergelijke formulier op een PDA versie krijgen is niet eenvoudig en zal niet tot tijdwinst leiden bij de field engineer. Een papieren versie met pen is nog altijd sneller.
Met de digitale pen versie gebruikt de field engineer nog steeds een papieren versie. Na het invullen van het formulier kan de versie naar het kantoor verstuurd worden. Als blijkt dat verplichte velden niet ingevuld zijn, dan zal de pen de field engineer waarschuwen.
Het originele inspectieformulier kan desnoods achtergelaten worden bij de klant. De digitale kopie is direct beschikbaar op het kantoor voor verdere handmatige of automatische verwerkingen.




