"The use of Digital Pens & Mobile Technology
within Leeds City Council Social Services"

Ian Jones, Senior ICT Consultant
Corporate ICT Services, Leeds City Council

Ian provided an overview of the motivation for Leeds City Council adopting digital pen technology.  Within Social Services there are around 1,500 community support assistants who make regular home visits, and the various forms used meant that they had to fill in over two million pieces of paper every year.  This leads to duplication of effort and affects the morale of staff, who would rather be doing their job than filling in and filing paperwork.

DrainsAid, an external contractor that performs drain cleaning and maintenance for Leeds City Council, use digital pen technology and approached the council's Innovations Unit to let them know that they used the technology, and that it may have other applications within the council.  This highlighted an opportunity to change the way of working within Social Services.

The deployment of digital pen technology within Social Services has led to a saving of about three days a month for each community support assistant.  It was relatively straightforward to equip each worker with the technology; all that was required was a digital pen, a stock of suitable forms and a mobile phone.  This enables true mobile working without the need to use PDAs or laptops, which can be intrusive in the context of home visits.

A digital pen looks like a fatter version of an ordinary pen, and contains an infra-red camera that records movements over the dot patterns on the digital paper.  It also contains ink, so it does write on the paper like a conventional pen.  The pen recognises the 2mm x 2mm dot patterns and these can be used to record the pen's movements, which are stored and transmitted as a series of co-ordinates; the pen does not perform optical character recognition.  Digital pens can be used for signature verification, because the pattern of pen strokes used to form a signature can be stored and analysed, or compared against a previously stored pattern.

Some pens include a Bluetooth interface and can be used in conjunction with a mobile phone to send data via the mobile phone to a central server using secure HTTP.  The deployment by Leeds City Council makes use of this facility.

Digital paper - not to be confused with 'electronic paper' - is paper that has been overprinted with a dot pattern that acts as a two-dimensional barcode.  The dots are printed in a particular colour of printing ink that is visible to the infra-red camera in the pen.  Other colours and types of ink are used to overprint information on the paper that is human-readable but will be ignored by the pen.  The dots are arranged according to a pattern devised by the Swedish company Anoto, and the arrangement of the dots varies across the surface of the paper.  The paper is divided into 2mm x 2mm squares, and each of these squares contains a particular dot pattern.  It is the different arrangement of the dots that allows the pen to determine its current position on the page.

Different dot patterns are also used to denote the type of paper in use such as memos, notebook paper or forms of a particular type.  The Anoto system allows a paper area exceeding 4.6 million square kilometres to be covered with unique 2mm x 2mm dot patterns.  This huge range of possibilities allows a very large number of different forms and types of paper to be in use, with the pen readily able to distinguish between them.  The paper does have to be slightly thicker than normal (100gsm rather than 80gsm) to prevent reflection.

Digital forms are generated electronically and the dot patterns are stored on the server so that the data sent back to the server from the pen can be recognised.  These patterns are used to convert pen strokes to ASCII characters, and to recognise certain dot patterns such as the pattern used to identify a given form.  The data sent back is converted to an electronic representation of the form, and this can be made editable on-line (using a secure portal) to allow data review or corrections after the form has been initially filled in.  Form fields can be free-text, or can be restricted to limited lists of values (known as limited lexicons); these values can be single characters or words.

Ian concluded by outlining some of the benefits identified from deploying digital pens.

There is a low entry barrier; little training is required and most of the effort is associated with training users in the use of the mobile phone.  Using a digital pen to fill in forms printed on digital paper is much like using conventional pens and forms.  This means that the introduction of the technology causes little disruption.

Data can be sent back from the pen in real time and removes the overhead of ordinary paper forms having to be keyed onto the system.

The mobile phone can, as well as providing data transmission capability, be used as a phone! This aids communication between members of staff.  Information about rosters, and other messages, can be sent by text messages to social workers who are doing home visits.

The presentation was rounded off by questions and answers, plus an opportunity to examine and try out some digital pens and samples of digital forms.