A Bluetooth Digital Pen Technology worked on normal paper forms over any size, overprinted with a faint microscopic pattern of dots (Anoto dot pattern), and writes like a normal ball pen, which is hardly visible to the human eye. With our solution, the pattern on each printed form and its pages, is unique, just like a fingerprint or unique barcode so that each form can be kept separately from another.
An infrared camera, processor, flash memory, Bluetooth, and rechargeable battery are the major parts of each Digital Pen. When you write, the built-in optic lens automatically takes digital snapshots of the microdot pattern at a rate of between 50 and 100 images per second. Every snapshot takes enough data to enable the pen’s image microprocessor to decide the exact position of the digital pen and to capture everything it writes or draws like magic. Scanning, copying, or rekeying handwritten information never happens again.
Up to 100 pages of A4 text can be stored with a Bluetooth Digital Pen Technology which is sufficient for the electronic data capture needs of most businesses. The pen is charged by a lithium-ion battery just like a mobile phone and it is rechargeable. Each charge lasts the average user approximately 1 week of usage.
This may vary depending on how often pen usage is. The output from each completed form includes an image of the written form, a filled form, which includes any handwriting converted to text plus an XML stream of the converted handwriting.
The digital pen is the tool that, together with the dot patterned paper, enables you to store and transmit basically anything you write or draw to anywhere in the world.
The main parts of the Bluetooth Digital Pen Technology are a digital camera, an advanced image-processing unit, and a Bluetooth radio transceiver. It also contains an ink cartridge so that you can actually see what you have written or drawn.
We don’t find any buttons or displays on the digital pen. It looks and feels like an ordinary ballpoint pen and you use it in the same way. The pen by simply removing the cap can be activated and deactivated by replacing the cap again. It couldn’t be easier.
The dots of pattern are illuminated by infra-red light, making them visible to the digital camera. Digital snapshots, at a rate of 100 per second, are taken of the pattern (The ink from the pen is not visible to the camera. Therefore the pattern is not degraded by your writing).
For an image processor, it calculates, in real-time, the exact position in the entire Anoto proprietary pattern. During image processing, snapshots are compared and information about how the pen is held is also gathered and stored.
All the data from the image processor is packaged and loaded into the pen memory, which can store several fully written pages.
The Bluetooth transceiver can transmit the information, either directly to your computer, or forwarded via a relay device (e.g. mobile phone, personal computer, or handheld device) to Magicomm’s Mercury Service. From here all information will be forwarded for further processing elsewhere.
The pen holds an ordinary ink cartridge to make visible all that you have written or drawn. A force-sensing resistor measures the stylus tip force.
Faststream’s Digital Pen Solutions (built on Anoto’s Digital Writing Technologies) users complete paper forms as they do now, only with a special pen that works as a standard ink pen while at the same time electronically capturing everything that is written. After completing the paper form, that electronic data is instantly transmitted over the air to the Forms Server where an EXACT image of the completed paper form is created on the server (as though the paper had been scanned with a high-resolution color scanner). The Recognition Engine then converts the electronic pen strokes into XML data with impressive recognition accuracy, and then using any number of Forms Server Connectors, uploads the images & data to your line-of-business system, database, imaging/content system, and/or workflow system.
This ability to capture data from paper and push that data into a company information system, database, or any enterprise content repository in a matter of seconds from the moment a form is completed, is a game-changing benefit to many of our clients.
