Source: California Healthcare Foundation
Date: 3 of May 2007
Written by: Eric Wicklund, Contributing Editor
LUND, SWEDEN - It's been said that the pen is mightier than the sword. It may also be more powerful than the laptop.
Anoto Group AB, an 11-year-old company based in Lund, Sweden, is marketing a digital pen and paper technology that is designed to capture handwriting and graphic data and transmit it - real-time or in batch form - to a PC or other server.
According to Ebba Asly-Fahraeus, Anoto's vice president of global marketing, the technology has been used in banking and finance, shipping, logistics and inspections. Japan is now testing the product in schools and police departments (particularly in writing traffic tickets), while Hamburg, Germany is planning to use the technology in the voting booth.
For the past year, Anoto has been marketing digital pen and paper to the healthcare sector.
"It's quite a paper-intensive area," says Asly-Fahraeus, who notes that home healthcare providers and hospital emergency departments have shown the most interest so far. "All this does is take what you have written and create a digital copy."
The pen, slightly larger than a typical ballpoint pen, contains a camera, processor, memory chip, battery and Bluetooth transceiver, as well as an ink cartridge and force sensor. Hardware that accompanies the pen allows the user to print the almost-invisible dot pattern on any type of paper.
When writing, the camera takes digital snapshots (more than 50 per second) of the pattern on the paper, using a gridwork of pre-printed dots to capture the exact position of the pen and what it writes or draws. That data, which includes the time each pen stroke was made, who's using the pen and what paper form is being used, is captured in the pen's memory, which can handle up to 50 full letter-sized pages of data.
When it's time to download that data, the user need only tick a box on the paper, which is interpreted by the pen as a "send" command. The data is then sent by Bluetooth via a mobile phone to a designated server. The user can also choose to download data through a USB port to any PC.
Asly-Fahraeus says digital pen and paper technology appeals to doctors and nurses who don't have the time to sit down at a computer station or who don't want to carry around a cumbersome laptop. And while she points out that "handwriting recognition is a science by itself," the pen can actually follow the movement of the hand, rather than relying solely on the handwriting, to determine what is being written.
In France, the technology has been put to use to aid mammography diagnoses. In the United States, it's being used by Bethesda Emergency Associates, a Washington D.C.-based doctors' group. Barton W. Leonard, MD, says the technology is especially helpful to emergency room physicians and nurses.
"You get a lot of options in terms of taking it in different directions," he says. Leonard says emergency department doctors are hesitant to adopt electronic medical records because the documentation process is slow and sometimes unwieldy.
"As an ER doctor, you can imagine the last thing you want to do is have documentation slow you down," he says. With digital pen and paper technology, "you scribble it, and then you dock the pen whenever you want to dock the pen."
Asly-Fahraeus says digital pen and paper technology appeals to healthcare workers because it allows them to continue their tried-and-true method of taking notes by pen and paper.
Furthermore, she says, there's not much training involved to convert that process to EMRs. "This is new technology, but it's very simple," she says. "This doesn't take time for training. Doctors already know how to write." |
