Smart Pens & Paper

A big obstacle to digitization (the prerequisite to digitalization) is people not wanting to move away from pen and paper. Tablets in a manufacturing environment (e.g., with giant, intrinsically safe cases) are bulkier, heavier, and more inconvenient to carry around than the good old-fashioned clipboard with pen and paper. Digitalization’s reach into the manufacturing sector will be limited as long as this obstacle persists. 

To remove this obstacle, I would like to recommend Cognite develop smart pens and paper - similar to the Ophaya writing sets. That way, when writing with the smart pen on the compatible paper, the notes may be automatically synced to CDF, and then translated to machine-readable text.

The main challenges during this pursuit will be cyber security and cost.