Digital Pen Technology

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

The Nineteenth Judicial Circuit is a general jurisdiction court serving the third largest county in the State of Illinois by population. About twenty-five years ago, the Court implemented the Pretrial Services program in Lake County, Illinois. The basic function of this program is to prepare bond reports to provide information of the defendant to help the Court with its decision of whether or not to release or detain an individual. For many years, the Courts have been looking for a solution to help the Pretrial Bond Officers in the bond interview process with the defendant in jail. The interview process is done by using a regular pen and the bond report form on a clipboard. When the interview process is done, the officer then verifies the information and may use a liquid eraser to make modifications and changes to verified information. When verification of the information is completed the same report is submitted to Court in the original handwritten format. Each officer has a unique style of handwriting; some are neater than others. Some of the solutions that have been tried and tested involved the use of laptop computers with electronic bind report form and the use of voice recognition. Both of these solutions failed due to the limited space in the jail for the officer to use a laptop and because the noise level found inside the jail is not conducive to the voice recognition technology. In one of the Court technology conferences, digital pen technology was introduced, and it was later selected to be implemented. This solution has the same basic workflow process as the manual method using a paper bond report form and a regular pen. However, this digital pen is used with a well-formatted paper form to handwrite the information, which is then captured by the pen, and when data gathering is completed, the pen is docked on a computer where the application will read what is on the digital pen then transfer it to the computer. It will display the original handwriting, then convert it into a readable text format where the officer can make changes and updates to the form if necessary. The official report is produced in a readable, electronic format that gets printed and submitted to the court. The digital pen technology promotes efficiency, decreases potential for error in recording, storing, and transferring pretrial information, all with minimal disruption to the working habits of the existing pretrial bond officers.