Mahatma Gandhi, the most revolutionary personality behind Indian independence from the British, had one grudge in life. He believed, his handwriting was not very good. I read in my 2nd standard about him advocating the need of inculcating very good handwriting habits in Kids.
The use of computers has spoilt our handwriting habits. Rarely do we find the need to write anything on the piece of paper and even in those moments also we don’t feel happy due to our bad handwriting.
All this is going for a change with a smart pen developed by a German firm Lernstift. This pen helps to write legibly and gives warning when you are making mistakes. It starts vibrating whenever it notices a wrong spelt word or illegible word. There is inbuilt sensory mechanism in this pen which has some programmed feature recognizing how the words are formed. If you start writing, it notices the variation from the words and starts vibrating if the variation exceeds a limit. This can also help you in understanding the misspelling.
I went to their website and saw this green and white colored pen (as shown in the photograph) which works in two modes as Calligraphy mode or Orthography mode. In Calligraphy mode, the pen vibrates if the letter is written wrong or not in a legible way. In Orthography mode, the pen starts vibrating for misspelled word and twice to show any error in the sentence.
Since it is made by German company, hence I am not sure how it would work on English language. I believe, this would cover only limited languages in the beginning but over a period of time more and more languages can be accommodated.
I did not have the opportunity to use it but from the look of pen, it looked a little dull to me and can be made more appealing. Since it has a complete circuit to recognize the variation in writing, it must be heavier and may be difficult to handle. But that may improve with the passage of time if the product is well received by the market.
The product seems to be in prototype stage and the company plans to launch only few hundred pens by summer of 2013 and then going to mass market by winter 2013. The company had given a video but i could not understand it as it was in German language.
The prospective price is also not mentioned yet. This would be an important factor before it gets a mass share of market. But as an idea, I found it to be a pretty innovative one.