Feb
7
Written by:
admin
Saturday, February 07, 2009
What piece of equipment is so good that after just a few days of testing, it could potentially change your whole approach to taking notes.
The SMARTPEN from livescribe.
Available from Officeworks and Smartpen.com.au
This pen is a digitizer of the written word with a twist.
It has an infrared camera near the pen tip which records penstrokes whilst writing on special 'annoto' patterned paper (you cant see the pattern unless you look very closely). The pen also has a voice recorder and a small ARM computer. "So what!", I hear you say.
The twist is this! The audio is linked to the text you write. The page in effect becomes the index, or table of contents, into the audio timeline. When you tap the pen on a word on the page, the pen plays back the audio that was recorded starting at the time you wrote that word.
The pen has excellent audio recording fidelity for such a small unit and the onboard speaker is very adequate for the task. The pen also includes a set of ear buds speakers which have microphones on each ear bud allowing directional (3D ) audio recording.
This pen potentially solves a huge problem when dictating/writing notes at the end of consultations, particularly when running several consultations behind. Audio cues you record help you remember all the the important pieces of information included in the process of medical history gathering.
In fact, I ran on-time without the necessity to write copious notes during consultation and without the burden of having to dictate notes immediately after each consultation (while the details are fresh in memory). I can spend half an hour after the day is done, when I am relaxed and no longer under extreme time pressure finishing off dictating notes using the live scribe pen to replay consultations.
In fact I have just gone through a whole very busy session without dictating notes until the end of the day! My scant written notes and supplementary audio prompts have meant that the quality of my dictated notes is on par with my dictated notes during a quiet session.
Simply BRILLIANT. It is an empowering feeling to become a time lord. The day is more enjoyable, though I do have to sacrifice time at the end of the day to complete my notes especially on busy days. I gladly sacrifice that time for reduced in stress.