Using Mobile Phones for Secure, Distributed Document Processing in the Developing World

An interesting story on a framework developed by a PhD candidate for use of Smart Phones in developing countries: the information services architecture in the story uses a smart phone equipped with a built-in digital camera to process “augmented paper documents”.
“CAM, so called because the phone’s camera plays a key role in the user interface, is a three-tiered, document-based architecture for providing remote rural information services. The user tier comprises a set of paper forms and artifacts that people use to record information, perform queries, and conduct transactions. The server tier is a standard Web application server, which can reside locally, in a nearby town, or virtually in the Internet ether. The mobile phone acts as a roving middleware, playing the role of scanner, user interface, network, cache, and preprocessor. Figure 1 presents the CAM architecture’s overall structure.”

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