Abstract from Edinburgh University
This talk will describe our experimental use of digital pens for survey research. We are developing a technical solution for survey research organisations. Our experiment is to investigate when and where digital pens can have an edge over PDAs and TabletPCs in data collection. The product features of digital pens, PDAs and TabletPCs were aligned and compared. We found that the main obstacles for using digital pens in survey research are the lack of data capture/conversion software and the cost of printing questionnaires. We are customising our software to automate the data capture and method to print questionnaires [still on special paper, but] as usual documents by ordinary office printers. In our approach, questionnaires are just traditional questionnaires, except printing on special paper and filling in by using digital pens. No tedium/frustration is caused as in what we did for preparing OMR/OCR questionnaires. Little training is needed for the person who fills in the questionnaires. Both hard copies and soft data can be kept. Data can be stored in digital pens and transmitted to Bluetooth mobile phones (or PDAs or laptops) for processing. Digital pens and their combined use with PDAs would overcome existing user-interface issues of pure PDA approach in survey research.
Siu-wai Leung is a PhD student at School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He was Technical Manager at ACNielsen China, DP Manager at MBL Taiwan, and Research Fellow at University of Edinburgh.
Click here to download the presentation (PowerPoint, 2.0Mb)
| Back to: Top | Event | Home | Page last updated on 23 April, 2005 |