Digital Ink

Application for Wacom’s new WILL technology in healthcare

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PC World: “Wacom has grand designs for a new graphical language…WILL, short for Wacom Ink Layer Language, will store pen strokes in a Stroke File Format and allow them to be streamed using its Stroke Messaging Format. The file formats capture not only coordinates and pressure, but also who made an ink stroke, and when…One of the more far-fetched usage scenarios Wang proposed for WILL involved digitally signing documents using a pen that would certify who had manipulated it thanks to a built-in DNA sampling device.”

Like it or not the human race still loves to communicate via pen and paper.1 It’s a process that’s been ingrained in us for a very long time. It’s natural, and it’s going to be quite some time before we’re able to move to a completely different medium for communication. We’re well on our way to a digital world, but that won’t replace our need to use pen and paper for a great many things for quite some time to come.

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Note taking and tablets [inforgraphic]

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Here’s an interesting infographic from Livescribe that covers how users take notes with or without tablets.

Couple of things I find particularly interesting:

  • 54% of tablet owners take notes with pen and paper, i.e. not on their tablets. See my thoughts on that here.
  • Only 6% of tablet users take notes on their tablet with a stylus. I think this has more to do with the tablets that are out there and their uses, i.e. consumers are driving the tablet market.
  • Only 13% of users that purchased a stylus are happy with the experiecne. Two thoughts on this: 1) active digitizers rule, 2) the disconnect between writing on the screen and the appearance of “ink” on the screen is problematic. The new batch of tablets has improved this experience dramatically.

(infographic reproduced below with permission)

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The best inking application for Windows that you’ll never see

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Recently I posted something about Project Austin, a new digital note-taking application designed specifically for Windows 8 by Microsoft. Project Austin had me thinking about other cool inking applications. Microsoft OneNote immediately comes to mind, but it’s really not the same. OneNote is overkill for most note taking needs. How about Windows Journal? Journal is … Read more

Project Austin: A new not taking app from Microsoft designed specifically for Windows 8

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Microsoft Blog (Visual C++ Team): “…For the past few months I’ve been working on a Windows 8 app along with a small team of developers from the Visual C++ team, we call it Project Code Name Austin. Austin is a digital note-taking app for Windows 8. You can add pages to your notebook, delete them, … Read more

Shareable Ink plus EHR equals interesting alternative

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EMR Daily News: “Shareable Ink®, an enterprise cloud computing company that transforms paper documentation to structured data, today announced three new partnerships with leading EHR vendors that will further the company’s reach in delivering a reliable, portable and easy to implement electronic data capture solution that works with existing physician workflows. The agreements with Greenway … Read more

“What’d I miss?” – Week of November 22nd

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Turkey_cartoonWelcome to the Thanksgiving edition of “What’d I Miss?”. Thanksgiving is a wonderful time that marks the beginning of my favorite time of the year. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump until the New Year.  Squeeze Christmas in there and you have the best 6 week span of the year. Good times, good times.

As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.

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Cool Technology for Pharmacy

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While not specifically related to pharmacy, this is very interesting. Stephen S. Hau, the founder of PatientKeeper in the 90’s, has created a new product called Shareable Ink. The product uses a digital pen on paper forms to capture handwriting. The information is transferred, via wireless connection, to a server where the information is digitized. The technology is not new per se, but the application to medicine in this way is.

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