Pen Computing

One of the biggest factors affecting your productivity in IT is the speed and way in which you enter data into your computer. The vast majority of users use keyboards. Beyond that there is a plethora of other systems, including speech recognition, optical character recognition and an array of other technologies.

There are many situations where one has to first enter the data onto a paper form and then send it back to the office for entry into the computer. This is very costly because of the double handling and the potential for transcription errors.

This is where the power of Pen Computing comes in.

Handwriting recognition by a machine in real time goes back to before World War I. One of the earliest patents was granted in 1914. In the 90’s Microsoft released Pen Extensions for Windows 3.1 and called them Windows for Pen Computing.

Today the most common form of Pen Computing is a tablet notebook PC. This is essentially a normal laptop with a tablet LCD screen. You open up the screen, rotate it around 180o and shut it back. You then use a stylus pen to write on the glass. As you write the software converts your handwriting to typed text. Alternatively you can leave the text as handwriting but the system translates it to computerised text in the background. It then enables you to do things like search for the text, something you cannot do with normal handwriting.

Unlike with speech recognition, which in my opinion is relatively undeveloped technology even though it has been around for some two decades, handwriting recognition is very productive. I tried out the new version of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition recently and it effortlessly recognised my 20-word sentence with 100% accuracy. This is in spite of the fact that my handwriting is so illegible that my bank manager rang me recently to verify if my signature on a cheque I wrote recently was actually mine. This recognition ability has been further improved in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

You can enter text into any program (like Word, Excel or Outlook email) including databases. This is where the potential for great productivity lies. For professionals like assessors, medical workers, building compliance or rental property inspectors, or surveyors or anybody who has a need to complete forms and typing is not practical, this means that the data can be entered directly into the final database using handwriting without the need for the form to be re-typed later. With a datacard the data can be remotely entered directly into the server back at the office and a report emailed automatically to the client even before the user has left the client site.

This is also a boon for workers who can’t type quickly or accurately. Many doctors I know fall into that category.

I spoke with one building inspection firm that uses this technology and they claim that Pen Computing saves them up to two hours per day of their inspectors’ time. This translates to tens of thousands of dollars of extra fees they can charge per annum per inspector.

Like many ideas in IT, in the right situation this is one technology that can give you an unbelievable return on your investment.

By Alan Chew

Managing Director of the Houston Technology Group

This article appeared in the July 2009 edition of the Waikato Business News, for which Alan writes a regular column as "Your IT Adviser".