Swedish digital pen and paper specialist, Anoto, has partnered with wireless BlackBerry platform developer, PaperIQ, to enable digital pen and paper input to be wirelessly transmitted to the character recognition system.
The Anoto Digital Pen Integration Kit for BlackBerry provides users with everything required to integrate Anoto’s digital pen technology with a BlackBerry smartphone application or enterprise system.
The kit enables any existing paper-based forms to be printed with the Anoto pattern, so that they can be used with the digital pen.
As the pen records everything the person writes on the dot patterned paper, using Bluetooth technology, the data can be sent wirelessly to the BlackBerry and then transmitted back to the office via the BlackBerry device for further processing – without the need to type up notes.
“PaperIQ has a track record of highly successful projects where BlackBerry smartphones and our digital pens have helped organisations achieve dramatic cost-savings, greater efficiency and more focused working practices,” said Ebba Åsly Fåhraeus, vice president of marketing for Anoto Group AB.
“The Anoto integration kit for BlackBerry is a milestone en route to making Digital Pen and Paper the most popular data capture mechanism in the healthcare sector.”
The technology has already been piloted at the UK’s Medicals Direct, who carry out health screenings on behalf of life insurance providers, and have used the technology to streamline the processing of half a million screening forms which its nurses complete every year.
Once a medical is completed, the pen transmits the form data wirelessly to the nurse’s BlackBerry, which automatically forwards it to a back-end server.
An Anoto spokesperson told E-Health Europe: “The technology has reduced the turnaround time for the forms from seven days to just 24 hours. The system cost in the region of £400,000 over two years to implement – five times less than the tablet PC solution Medical Direct had originally considered.
“As it is an out-of-the-box solution that requires little development, the integration kit will make it easier for channel partners and in-house IT departments to create combined BlackBerry and digital pen and paper applications.”
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