Form Design and Layout
Form Enablement
Form Printing
Form Completion
Connection Devices
Form Routing/Forwarding
Form Processing - Xcallibre Digital Platform

How it Works?

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1. Form Design and layout Top

Good Form Design is imperative for a successful project. Our highly skilled development team will create a new form design and layout that will make your form easier for users to fill out.  Also, we can take your existing form and by using our design tools, we add the Anoto dot pattern to it. (appears as you scroll over the above with pic) Anoto Dot Pattern: Almost invisible to the naked eye, the Anoto pattern consists of numerous intelligent small black dots that can be read by a digital pen. The Anoto dot pattern indicates the exact position of the digital pen. What’s more, the Anoto dot pattern on each page has a uniquely identity so that each page can be kept separate from another.

Example:
paper

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2. Form enablement Top

No special paper is needed for the forms as the form is simply regular paper printed with the Anoto dot pattern in the background. The pattern appears as light grey shading on the printed form.  The digital pen can be used on an infinite number of forms.

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3. Form Printing Top

Forms are printed on standard office laser printers. The client receives a post-script file after their form has been enabled and can print on demand or in bulk by an XCallibre authorised printer.

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4. Form Completion Top

The user fills out the form with the digital pen that contains normal ink (available in 7 different colours with refill ink cartridges). As the user writes, a tiny camera in the digital pen registers its movement across the surface of the paper printed with the dot pattern enabled with Anoto functionality. This creates a digital image of exactly what is written with each pen stroke, time and date-stamped.

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5. Connection Devices Top

The digital pen writes like a normal ink pen, which captures handwriting as it is written through use of a built-in camera, and transmits the handwriting through a PC or cell phone for processing. The pen is secure and more durable than a PC or tablet. It can be used indoors or outdoors as it is unaffected by bright daylight or low light environments. 

Each digital pen has a unique ID. All digital pens that are used by Xcallibre are registered to our servers and can only communicate with that “trusted” server. All information captured from both USB & Bluetooth pens is encrypted by the pen before uploading. Every pen contains a real time clock making fraudulent form completion easily detectable. Our Xcallibre servers retain all pen stroke files, original images and XML upload files.

  • Connection Devices
  •  Both Mobile Phone and PC can be used as a connection device.
  • When Mobile Phone is being used as connection device, it requires a bluetooth pairing between the digital pen and the mobile phone.
  • When PC is being used as a connection device , to transfer the data it requires docking of Pen to a USB Cradle

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6. Form Routing/Forwarding Top

Phone Router

When a mobile phone is being used a connection device, we install a software called “Mobile Router” on the mobile which acts a  routing agent and transfers the data from phone to an Application Server called Pen LookUp System (PLS) via GPRS Connection. Pen LookUp System then forwards the pen data to Form specific Application for processing of pen data.
The router on the phone has the following functionalities:

  • Transfers the data from phone to Xcallibre using GPRS
  • Allows to send images/photographs using integrated camera
  • Allows validation of form fields on your phone
  • Allows to send the GPS locations

PC Router

When a PC is being used a connection device, we install a software called, “PC Router.” When Pen is docked to PC via USB Docking Cradle, Router downloads all the data from Pen and transfers the data to Xallibre called Pen LookUp System (PLS) via Internet. Pen LookUp System then forwards the pen data to Form specific Application for processing of pen data.

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7. Form processing - Xcallibre Digital Platform Top

  • Place the Digital Pen in the USB cradle or connect via a mobile phone to download the pen’s contents for processing. In the USB docking station, it takes about a second per form page to transmit. The encrypted XML vector file of the pen strokes is transmitted to Xcallibre’s Digital Platform for processing into both an image of the completed form AND into the interpreted data from the form fields.  After this hits our server, we run the Hand Writing Recognition to convert what’s being written on a paper.

HANDWRITING RECOGNITION: Handwriting recognition software enables computer systems to convert characters, words and more generally text written by hand into digital characters or digital text.
Xcallibre uses Vision Objects handwriting recognition software which is the world leader in this field. 25 language packs are currently available.
Depending on the way the handwritten data is captured and represented, two domains of recognition exist:

  • OCR/ICR - Optical/Intelligent Character recognition

Processed data is either a colour, a black and white, or a gray scale image, obtained by an optical scanner or a camera.

  • HWR - Handwriting Recognition

Processed data is the result of capturing the trajectory of strokes written by a pointing device, such as the digital Pen.
The result is a set of points ordered by time, speed, accelerations, time order of strokes, writer ID.
HWR  vs OCR/ICR

  • Richer information captured (speed, acceleration, stroke order, writer ID)
  • Separate handwritten information from whatever is printed on the paper and this leads to:
  • Higher accuracy in the recognition results and faster validation process

Accuracy is drastically improved by using lexicons

  • User names
  • Place names
  • Street names

Automatic Data verification

  • ID Numbers
  • Fieldworker Names
  • Coded Forms reduce error
  • Validates Form fields based on rules specific to each project
  • SMS notification to end users notifying them of any errors in capture of Form fields
  • Gathering of GPS Co-ordinates of the data collection point
  • Upload photos with form data
  • Reading of barcodes

Alerts - Validation, Integrity & security

The digital pen communicates using end-to-end cryptography. A message written with the pen is encrypted within the pen before transmission. The message remains secret from the very moment it leaves the pen. It uses 128/256-bit symmetric key encryption
Upon development of forms, validation and integrity rules are predefined and during the forms processing stage, this queries are run and automated responses are generated which are sent to the originator as well as managers, etc in the form of sms, email or automated callbacks.
With unlimited automatic validation rules built in to the back office application, data collectors are notified real-time of any discrepancies and have the ability to correct and resubmit the data.
Each digital pen has a unique ID. All digital pens that are used by Xcallibre are registered to our servers and can only communicate with that “trusted” server. All information captured from both USB & Bluetooth pens is encrypted by the pen before uploading. Every pen contains a real time clock making fraudulent form completion easily detectable. Our Xcallibre servers retain all pen stroke files, original images and XML upload files.

Data Push and Export

Data export and push services are an integral part of any Digital Pen and Paper solution, since it is not only necessary to receive data  from the field quickly, but as important to push this data securely into organizations existing database for storage and query. Services are also available to export data to various formats such as pdf, excel, Microsoft access and the ever popular xml or open standards.
Data push is most often relayed using secure xml web services with SOAP APIs.

GIS

The GIS servers are used to store submitted GIS coordinates and geo-referenced sketches as well as to allow users to query, manipulate and view this data using ESRI ArcGIS server browser based applications.

Form Viewer/Editor

The web/browser based form viewers and editors are used where organizations lack back office systems or where access to forms data is required via the internet. These viewers are available for purchase or rental in both Java and Microsoft.NET. They allow for the basic viewing and editing of all forms, but are more popular due to the ability to customize them as reporting, Business Intelligence and workflow tools.