Pen2Net Advantages

Pen2Net Advantages

Pen2Net’s technology significantly reduces the error rate of handwriting acquisition and tracks movement so closely a near-100% match is possible between actual written and digitized text. The optical subsystem on Compupen repeatedly tracks the paper surface and captures even nuances of movement that elude other mechanical devices.

Pen2Net’s fully self-contained devices also offer significant ergonomic advantages over competing products. By eliminating cumbersome external clips and screens, Compupens offer the user an extremely portable, handy writing instrument.

Over Mechanical Pens

Compupen’s state-of-the-art optical subsystem virtually eliminates inherent motion-detection errors, unlike “intelligent pen” designs of the past. Since the dawn of computing, the “intelligent pen” has been considered the ideal data input mechanism. Early pen designs dating to the 1960s and progressing to the present rely on mechanical accelerometers, contact distantometry, and even gyroscopic sensors to maintain a track of the user’s movements.

The complexity and expense of designing mechanics severly hampers the manufacturer’s ability to mass-produce mechanical-based “intelligent pens”, however. Accelerometer-based approaches suffer from inherent inaccuracy in the accelerometer chipsets, progressive error-accumulation over time, and high sensitivity to external unrelated movement (walking), among other problems. Pen2Net’s optics eliminate almost 100% of the difficulties with mechanics:

Optical-input chipsets lack breakable, maintenance-intensive moving parts
The optical subsystem is very resistant to external movement, instead focusing solely on nib-to-paper movement for maximum accuracy
Optical systems allow flexibility in medical chart barcode reading applications (impossible with mechanical systems)
The optics in Compupen are low-power-consumption (vs. gyroscopic designs) chipsets, allowing significant increases in battery life
Optical-input systems remain clear of both ink and paper (unlike contact distantometers)

Over Clip-Device Pens (n-scribe™)

Pen2Net offers significant size and ergonomic advantages over pens requiring additional clip-on modules. Competitor pens depending on inferterometry or clip devices by design hamper the user with a bulky add-on without with their device is unusable!

The entire range of Pen2Net products functions free and clear of any outside device. By eliminating cumbersome extra devices attached to the writing surface, Compupen truly offers pen-like performance 100% of the time in 100% of writable surfaces!

Over LCD-Displays (Pen Computers)

Pen2Net’s pen by nature eliminates all bulky add-on components! The 100% pen form-factor designed by Pen2Net engineers houses all electronics, including Bluetooth transceiver, host processor subsystem, optical sensing subsystem, and ink cartridge within a traditional-sized pen housing!

While LCD display technology is useful for external web navigation and document markup (from a word processor), Pen2Net feels the true mobile application is a self-contained wireless input device. While serving their purpose well as ouput devices, LCD displays are

bulky
prone to breakage
significant power consumers
difficult to use without power-hungry backlights
expensive!

The cost alone of a broken LCD screen covers the estimated cost of Compupen five-fold! While Pen2Net’s applications do not offer the output capabilities of LCD “pen-computers”, they offer such significant size and portability advantages that Pen2Net believes Compupen and Medi/SciPen can easily surpass the LCD market shortly after public release.

Advantages Over PDA-specific Scripting

The market for small, portable personal digital assistants (PDAs) is booming with Information Data Corp (IDC) forecasts global PDA shipments to jump 76% year over year to 10.6m in 2000.

Extended growth in the PDA segment continues even as users are traditionally required to master new “alphabets” (as in Palm Computing’s PalmOS and Graffiti) and work from small, power-hungry LCD displays.

Graffiti Specialized Alphabet on PalmOS platform

The majority of PDA alphabets are designed to predict handwriting with near 100% accuracy and function directly on the host processor. By eliminating variation and forcing users to adapt to a new character set, character shapes become easy to decypher in host software.

Pen2Net handwriting recognition is expected to meet or exceed the level achieved by special character alphabets as used on PDAs, yet do so with standard English script. The host software delegates processing of handwritten stroke data to powerful Pen2Net servers and in certain instances to Pen2Net staff (Medipen and Scipen) for guaranteed human-level accuracy in document transcription. By reducing the burden on the host processor (no OCR capability, no document edit capability) and shifting it to a powerful central server cluster, Pen2Net expects to match the accuracy of traditional PDA-like scripting while allowing plain-paper handwriting input.

Graffiti™ (left) vs Pen2Net (right) representation of handwritten script

Advantages over PDA-Keyboard Combinations

A logical extension to a PDA, the foldable keyboards offered by manufacturers give a much improved input method over the special PDA script. The keyboard offers speed to typists and a comfortable handrest for long-term data input into the PDA (during long note-taking). Also, portable keyboards eliminate all error induced by the built-in OCR mechanism in the PDA.

The large drawback to such devices is their significant bulk, however; often sized to match the PDA itself, extendable or foldable keyboards arguably defeat the purpose of a handheld data processing unit! While ingeniously designed, such keypads offer neither comfortable typing nor significant space efficiency. The small keys often resemble those of laptop keypads,with very little vertical travel and cramped accessory keys vital to those in the scientific community. Mobile data input is cramped as well, requiring a careful balance between typing pressure and keypad movement, all the while directing the user’s gaze into a diminutive LCD as text scrolls into input fields.

In contrast, the Pen2Net family of devices needs no additional devices for input, relying instead on built-in optical recognition subsystems to gather position information and present it via Bluetooth and the Internet to the user in a finished form. Pen2Net consumer products by their nature are designed for portability, maximum simplicity, and 100% natural handwriting “feel”. Compupen is as comfortable as a standard ballpoint, yet offers far superior flexibility over the foldable keyboard at a reduced cost and weight!

In addition, Pen2Net products easily accept mathematical equation figures, scientific design, engineering sketches, medical diagrams, and any other figure impossible to enter with PDA and PDA-keyboard units!

Advantages Over Anoto™ Pen Technology

Pen2Net’s chief competitor in the “intelligent pen” arena is Anoto, designed by Sweden-base Anoto AB.

Functioning with an optical sensing mechanism similar to Pen2Net devices, Anoto derives position information from a closely-spaced grid of infinetessimally small dots. The dot pattern is a proprietary pattern and accurately maps the pen’s location on paper to a logical map in the onboard pen controller. The dot tracking of Anoto allows very precise placement of the pen in absolute coordinates (to the edges of the paper), while maintaining the same pen form factor as traditional writing pens.

The Anoto™ Pen features a digital camera (dark area behind the pen nib) and special writing paper (off-white dot-offset) to determine absolute writing position

The chief disadvantage to Anoto™ writing instruments is their chief strength: reliance on specialized paper. In addition to purchasing the pen, consumers are required to purchase specialized paper for every writing application for the life of the pen. While a good business model for Anoto™, the specialized paper reduces significantly the portability of the pen (requiring either access to an Internet-connected printer for Anoto paper, or Anoto paper itself). Pen adoption withing organizations is also significantly hampered with the requirement of specialized Anoto paper purchasing. Any application as envisioned by Pen2net becomes impossible without replacing pre-typed forms, medical charts, scientific handwriting notebooks, and financial documents (e.g. check signature verification).