A high-tech pen that incorporates a camera and image recognition technology could change the world of health care dramatically, streamlining both billing and data tracking for doctors and nurses.

Vernon Huang – an anesthesiologist and former Apple employee – designed the Sharable Ink system, starting a company of the same name to monetize the technology. According to Elizabeth Armstrong Moore, blogging at CNET, the pen automatically captures images of anything that it writes and sends the information to a remote server, where the image is interpreted and used to automatically populate database fields. This enables physicians to easily translate written text into usable data.

However, Moore writes that Huang already has some competition, including a German firm called Ontaris that uses the technology to track glucose levels in patients who may not have round-the-clock access to the online forms needed to add their information to the database.

Optical character recognition technology has been around for some time, but its advent on mobile platforms is a relatively recent development.

This entry was posted by Mobility Management News Desk on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Managing Mobile Devices News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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