By Edward Belgeonne, CEO and Founder of Destiny Wireless

Imagine two different scenarios… One is an indoor risk assessment meeting with senior people. The other is an engineer carrying out a site inspection in the field. What’s the best data capture solution in each case?

Our risk assessor may well be tech savvy and comfortable using quite sophisticated technology while conducting her meeting. She can get to a power source to take over from batteries if she needs to. Direct sunlight and screen resolution are unlikely to be a problem; reliable connectivity for transmitting the completed data may not be time critical. So in this case, a modern tablet, such as an iPad, could well be ideal.

By contrast, our engineer is under pressure to complete his inspection, report his findings, and get on to the next job quickly. The form he fills in will ideally be a series of tick boxes and a few fields of data. He needs to give his customer a paper record to sign and keep as evidence. Then, he needs to be able to transmit the data back to head office quickly and easily without worrying about connectivity or network congestion, in order that the job can be invoiced the same day. In this case, a digital pen would be the perfect answer.

Two very different environments; two totally different applications for electronic data capture. And while they may be at two ends of a huge spectrum of widely varying needs, they do go to show that no one size solution ever fits all, surely?