Digital paper replacing pulp

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Oct, 2004

Illegible prescriptions scrawled on physicians' notepads could become a thing of the past, thanks to two complementary technologies developed at the University at Buffalo and the University of Rochester that together are being licensed by mobileLexis, a digital paper solutions company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. The firm plans to use the technologies, which were marketed together through a new effort to commercialize research conducted at the upstate New York institutions, to develop a secure, electronic prescription system using digital paper.

"Since we focus on the health care, financial, and government markets, we needed to have both a reliable and robust means of translating the handwritten information from paper to computer and a powerful and proprietary method of securing that information for Internet transfer." asserts Rod Sheets, president of mobileLexis. "Accuscript and AuthentImage resolve both of these issues quite nicely and more then satisfy our data requirements." Digital paper, which is not yet on the market, looks and feels like its pulp-derived ancestor, but is endlessly reusable, recording, capturing, and sending text that users write by hand, employing a specially designed, electronic pen. Accuscript, the Buffalo technology, allows for unmatched handwriting recognition on digital paper, while AuthentImage, the Rochester contribution, is a digital-authentification package that ensures both the security and integrity of documents on digital paper.

The two combined provide mobileLexis with critical features for its MDScript product, which will process prescriptions in real-time through the transmission of pen-stroke information to a computer or server. Accuscript will translate the handwritten information into digital data and AuthentImage then will secure it for transmission to the pharmacy or health-care provider.

While most consumers are familiar with the use of the electronic pads they use to sign for packages or when they charge a purchase, those gadgets only capture data; they do not contain any handwriting-recognition features. "Most of these online devices are just for signatures and nobody ever will read or recognize them unless there's a question about one of them," points out Venu Govindaraju, a University at Buffalo professor of computer science and engineering. "But with digital paper applications, the bar is much higher. The software has to be application-specific, so that a basic lexicon, or vocabulary, can be constructed which guides the software program in recognizing words correctly." He also notes that while Accuscript's first application may be in the medical-information field, it easily can be customized to other markets.

AuthentImage, meanwhile, is a new way to hide information within an ordinary digital image and to extract it again without distorting the original data. The technique will solve a dilemma faced by digital image users, particularly in sensitive military, legal, and medical applications. Until now, users had to choose between an image that has been watermarked to establish its authenticity and one that is not but preserves all the original information, allowing it to be enlarged or enhanced to show detail. When information is embedded using the new method, authorized users can do both.

"The technique will be widely applicable to situations requiring authentication of images with detection of changes, and it also can be used to encode information about the image itself, such as who took the picture, when, or with what camera," asserts Murat Tekalp, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Rochester.

"The greatest benefit is in determining if anyone has clandestinely altered an image. These days, many commercial software systems can be used to manipulate digital images. By encoding data in this way we can be sure the image has not been tampered with, and then remove the data within it without harming the quality of the picture."