Pranav Mistry poses with his hi-tech RFID-equipped sticky note
Imagine you scribbled a sticky note about an upcoming doctor’s
appointment. You place the note on your home desktop computer, only to
forget about the appointment.
But guess what? The note reminds you about your appointment via a friendly
text message on your mobile phone.
Indeed, such technology will soon be possible, thanks to Pranav Mistry, an
alumnus of IIT-Bombay.
Sticky
notes are one of the most ubiquitous and convenient items in our daily
lives. By simply scribbling and sticking them on a surface, they help
us manage our ‘to-do’ lists and capture short reminders or information
that we may need in the near future. But with our lives going digital,
pen and paper are fast losing their place of importance.
“I love
sticky notes,” says Mistry, a graduate student at the US-based
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. “They are handy and
quick. But I wanted them to be active, remind me of my appointments,
and help me manage my world better; so I just made them a little smart.”
Mistry,
who hails from Palanpur in Gujarat, is the inventor of ‘Quickies’ –
intelligent sticky notes that can be digitally searched, located, and
can send reminders and messages.
The goal of Quickies is to
bring one of the most useful inventions of the 20th century – the
sticky note – into the digital age, says Mistry.
Quickies
connect remotely to a computer, collaborate seamlessly, and update you
via various sources, such as sending an SMS on your mobile phone.
How does it work?
The
process is simple: As the user notes down a reminder on a physical
sticky note, the information is simultaneously captured and stored as a
digital note on a computer. A computer program, coupled with
digital-pen hardware, enables this capturing.
The computer
program processes the digital note, recognises and converts the
hand-written text into digital text, and applies some computational
methods to understand the context and the content of the information.
Illustration: Sudhir Shetty
The program is also smart. For example, in a scenario where a note
was written about an appointment, it updates the user’s calendar and
also reminds him of the scheduled appointment via an SMS on his mobile
phone.
The Quickies can also be used as location tags for items such as books.
“One
of the most interesting features is ‘findability’. At the back of each
of the Quickies is a unique RFID tag, which makes it possible to locate
them in the house or office,” Mistry says.
But wouldn’t the Quickies be rendered useless without the digital pen? Not so.
“The
core innovation that drives ‘Quickies’ lies in the algorithms and
intelligence,” Mistry says. “Although there are many digital pens which
can be used with the technology, a small scanner would eliminate their
need, and a normal pen could be used in that setup..”
“Just to let you know,” he adds, “we have a version where you don’t need to be
near a computer.”
And what would the cost be?
“At present, the system costs us around $75 (Rs 3,000), although that can be
cut by half,” he says.
>From banking to third-world
“There are a million things the smart sticky notes can do,” Mistry says.
If
your mom prefers writing on paper rather than using cell phones and
computers, she can simply leave a message on a sticky note when leaving
for the market. You receive her message as an SMS or an email later.
“Recently,
I also made it possible to use Quickies as an interface to your daily
finance activities,” he says. “A person can write ‘Pay XYZ Rs 540.34’
and the system will take care of the transfer, from generating and
sending a cheque to XYZ or transferring to XYZ’s bank account, to
getting an authorisation from the user.”
The best part about the Quickies is that it can be used by anyone, in any
language.
“Quickies
supports various languages,” he says. “You can use Hindi, Gujarati,
Marathi and most of the Indian Languages with them.
“I am in the
process of creating a prototype where normal papers will be used as an
interface to computers, replacing the keyboard and mouse. I want to
eliminate the barrier of not knowing English – and make technology
available to every Indian.”
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