Lightweight Note-Taking Tools Using a Confederation of Mobile Capture & Access Devices

Informal note taking is a significantly different task from note taking in structured settings. This type of activity requires a special set of requirements including a substantial lowering of hurdles to capture and access across a variety of environments. Cepher is a prototype note capture system that supports the capture and retrieval of short notes through a variety of input devices. People would often like to use a variety of methods to immediately capture these thoughts instead of waiting until later for an available recording mechanism. Current digital note capture systems tend to be monolithic applications that do not either dynamically support a variety of input mechanism or allow flexible access from a variety of viewers. Wireless sensor network research focuses on using sensor nodes in ubiquitous computing environments instead of the traditional routing and ad hoc networking issues. Cepher leverages research advances in hardware and software to provide a flexible infrastructure for note taking applications, which can then be treated as a federation of independent input, output, sensing and storage subsystems.