Digital pen technology reports disease fast. and prevent outbreaks.

Livestock farmers in the country can now breathe a sigh of relief after the introduction of a digital pen technology used by veterinary officers to immediately report to the capital about any disease outbreak within ten seconds. The innovative tool which reports about an outbreak to the capital in ten seconds is aimed at saving millions of shillings worth of livestock which are lost due to longer periods of over three weeks that manual processes take hence making it difficult to contain an outbreak in time. The old trend has greatly been revolutionized with the Digital Pen Technology which reports about an outbreak to the capital in the shortest time span. The technology entails use of a digital pen, digital paper and an internet enabled phone. The digital paper has commands that are interlinked with the pen. It has a start and end command boxes. When one ticks the start box then the Bluetooth in the pen is activated and the pen will note anything that will be written on the paper using the camera on it and when the end box is clicked then the information is automatically stored in the pen’s memory chip. The veterinary officer just writes on the digital pare normally and then the details are recorded simultaneously by the camera on the pen to the memory chip. According to Dr. Kahariri,one of the brains behind the innovation noted, the technology is better than smart phones and gives users ample time to note the details. “Field workers and veterinarians cannot take time punching in information on a phone, trying to find the small keys on a touch screen that might be impossible to see in the bright sunlight. A digital pen, however, has a miniature infrared camera that records writing as the pen passes over paper sending the data wirelessly using Bluetooth technology to a cell phone and then onward to a central server.” The pen can store 40 forms on its’ memory chip. Once the information has been sent to the capital for analysis the platform also allows editing and adding more data on a similar report earlier keyed in. The innovative technology was first initiated by the United Nations agricultural agency; Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Since the introduction the technology, Dr. Kahariri noted that they have been able to detect and contain some of the fatal animal diseases on time and therefore improving their relations with the pastoralist communities. The digital pen technology can locate the exact position of the outbreak through GPS as the technology locates both longitude and latitude of the place. The use of the digital pen technology will help increase productivity by reducing endemic animal diseases that lower productivity but also lower zoonotic disease transmissions that threaten small-scale livestock producers in poor countries as well as human health in all countries. source