Scientifi cComputing.com 9 August 2012

ELN

The explosive growth of tablet computing has taken many by surprise, and vendors are starting

to test the waters

Tablets and ELN: A Honeymoon

S ince the early days of electronic labora-tory notebook (ELN)

technology, many have dreamt of a paper notebook replacement that is truly portable, transforms handwrit-ing, and is suitable for a laboratory environment. But, the hardware and software technology never quite caught up to those dreams. Ruggedized Windows Tablets were tried by many companies; they never really caught on, except for product

qual-ity and

procedure execution

applications, where data entry is

less intensive than it is in discovery research.

Now, with Apple selling close to 100 million iPads since

2011, and with close to 1.5 bil-lion smartphone users, the world has changed in a very short period of time. Are ELN and tablets finally going to walk the aisle in a marriage of convenience?

Today, when we ask scientists about what they envision when they hear the term “ELN,” many

weave an iPad somewhere into the definition. Commonly, there is not a distinction between software and hardware, as their vision is a holistic platform for data entry and access with an App-like user interface. They want simple. They want mobile. They want it to operate like the other tablet Apps that they use at home. Overall, these are pretty high expectations.

Until very recently, these desires have been unfulfilled. There has been resistance from many vendors to invest in tablet applications. There are many reasons purported: lack of demand from corporate IT, poor data entry capabilities, and few scientific applications to support the

domain functionality required by users. The standard response of “we run on a tablet!” in reality translates to running an ELN thick-client via Citrix (or other terminal service) for most of them. In this way, suppli-ers can meet the needs of the vast majority of users and the occasional tablet user with a single development environment.

Also, the market is still relatively small, and development is expensive to build and test across multiple platforms (e.g., Windows, browser, iOS, Android), particularly with thousands of lines of legacy code to deal with. Nevertheless, running a thick-client via Citrix limits use primarily to occasional experiment

Michael H. Elliott

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Scientifi cComputing.com 10 August 2012

browsing. Even with the upcoming Microsoft Surface tablet, applications built for older ver-sions of Windows may not present themselves well in a touch environment, as they never were designed with this paradigm in mind.

The impact of IT resistance cannot be under-stated and defi nitely impacts vendor direction. Though the glacier around using anything but a standard Windows platform is melting, it is doing so slowly. IT organizations are stretched more than they ever have been, and support-ing yet another platform — particularly in regulated environments — just adds to their burden. Leveraging the cloud, where tablet ap-plications can really shine, can help IT to lower administrative costs and infrastructure sup-port requirements. But, from surveys we have conducted over the last two years, less than 10 percent of corporate IT supports ELN in the cloud, citing concerns over security and intellectual property protection.

CONSUMERIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC SOFTWAREThe attitude of “waiting for user demand” is

not unlike Microsoft dumping their investment in tablets several years ago only to see the market explode. They didn’t have “user demand” and are now trying to play catch-up to Apple. Market re-search forecasts project tablet sales to exceed those of laptops by 2016, with annual unit shipments of nearly 400 million. Gartner recently said overall PC sales from 2011 to 2012 actually declined. Additionally, Android and iOS phones are defi n-ing expectations of user interfaces and mobility for their 500-million-and-growing user base. This

“consumerization” of IT solutions will forever change the nature and design of scientifi c software. This is inevitable. Scientists tell us over and over again they want applications that are simple and non-invasive into their workday. They yearn for a compelling user experience. As ELN have grown with features, they have grown in complexity, mov-ing further and further afi eld from the desire.

The ease of which data can be entered on a tablet is hotly debated. Concerns over screen real estate, limitations of pop-up keyboards, and famil-iarity with traditional mouse navigation are often highlighted. The iPad, in particular, was never

designed to be used with a mouse — the touch interface was the objective in the first place. That is the reason many of the applications de-signed around the mouse running under Citrix make the ELN look rather poor. User interface designs must take advantage of the strengths of the platform.

The number of third-party add-on input accessories coming onto the market is explod-ing with devices such as Bluetooth keyboards and active digitizer stylus pens. Digitizer pens (e.g., Cregle iPen, Byzero Studio Pen) support proximity sensitivity and are close to actual handwriting; which is especially useful in engi-neering or sketching an experiment design.

There is a treasure trove of Apps which perform a subset of modern ELN capabilities and are used by thousands each day to enter and manage data. Products such as Evernote,

GoodNotes and WritePad show how the iPad can be used for extensive notebooking; many support handwriting recognition as well. A cloud backend like Dropbox or Box.net extends data manage-ment and collaboration capabilities. Apps for image capture and barcode scanning exploit the camera as an input device. The number of statistical analysis tools seems to grow daily. Do you try to integrate all the products to develop a robust, fully functional ELN? At the end of the day, the vast majority of us-ers will never need all the features of a modern ELN that spans multiple scientifi c disciplines. Most of the time, 20 percent of the capabilities of a vendor’s product will meet 80 percent of the need. Trying to force-fi t the entire suite of capabilities onto a tablet may not be warranted nor worth the investment.

ELN

Figure 1: Accelrys iLabber on the iPhone allows access to experiments, with capabilities to review, add basic text and images, and follow recipes/procedures.

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Scientifi cComputing.com 11 August 2012

VENDOR APPROACHESThe number of ELNs continues to expand, with

well over 30 different products on the market. Their approach to tablets and touch interfaces var-ies across the entire spectrum, from doing nothing to very focused development efforts. Below, the approaches of three companies — Accelrys, IDBS, and Irisnote — are highlighted.

The acquisition of Contur last year provided scientifi c informatics supplier Accelrys with the cloud ELN, iLabber. The user interface for iLabber is a thin-client, enabling access via a tablet browser like Safari on the iPad. According to Dominic John, Director of Marketing for Accelrys, “We have had countless discussions around the use of an iPad with customers and, interestingly, managers imply they don’t want users to do mainstream data entry

in an iPad. They see this as an ineffi cient way to process data and enter data, and it opens up room for error. Thus, our experience with customers is to use the iPad for reviewing SOPs, past experiments and doing basic data entry while mobile. This could be pH readings, temperatures, balance read-ings, etcetera. The other use case we have is for re-viewers and managers wanting to run reports from any device. Using the Accelrys Enterprise Platform, we can run protocols that can access single or mul-tiple experiments from iLabber to create live and interactive resource/capacity/productivity HTML dashboards or cross experiment reports.”

The company developed an attention-grab-bing iPhone App (Figure 1) to access experiments contained in iLabber. It has capabilities to review experiments, add basic text and images, and follow recipes/procedures, targeting basic mobile require-ments. The company says it is investing heavily in mobility, and the App is an indication of their future direction; but with a clear focus on “useful versus cool.”

“Moving forward, I can see a better integration of Apps with barcode reading, in an instrument data service (via Wi-Fi), and integrated image capture for observations. I think these features will really start to explore the value of these devices,” says John.

IDBS believes in the “smaller is better” approach for their E-Workbook ELN. According to Scott Weiss, Director of Product Strategy, the company’s tablet direction is to “deliver smaller, lightweight tablet Apps for data consumption, offl ine tasks and simple data management. Example capabilities are inventory management, experiment annotations

and simple data entry.” Considering the user interface design, Weiss goes

on to say that, “The tablet needs to be approached very differently than traditional approaches — not only from a UI perspective — but also to leverage its strengths and weaknesses: focused functionality, ease-of-use and intuitive. We think this is essential to a successful tablet app. We are also paying a lot of attention to the design of our new thin-client interface to make sure it is tablet compatible. The design of the user interface is heavily inspired by tablet design with a touch-friendly operation.”

To support multiple platforms and applications with narrow functionality, IDBS developed a new underlying architecture using a Representational State Transfer (RESTful) Web service layer. This enables development of mobile Apps, thick-clients

ELN

Figure 2: The IDBS E-Workbook iPad prototype was recently shown at BioIT World.

Figure 3: IDBS’ ChemJuice Grande chemical drawing app for the iPad

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and Web applications on a common collection of services. Examples of their future are seen in Figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 is a prototype recently shown at BioIT World, while Figure 3 is IDBS’ new “ChemJuice Grande” chemical drawing App for the iPad.

One of the biggest strategic mobility investments has been from Irisnote, the company formerly known as Rescentris. Rescentris was an early en-trant into ELN with their CERF platform. Irisnote is taking an opposing viewpoint from that of the others by developing a fully-functional client on the iPad supporting data entry, collaboration, sig-natures and search (Figure 4). Communicating to a cloud-based server, the system supports a hierar-chy of notebooks, sections and experiments. The

Scientifi cComputing.com 12 August 2012

company says they understand the aforementioned problem of IT resistance to the cloud. The CEO of Irisnote, Peter Herz, told us that they will link their enterprise edition maintained at a client’s IT department to the cloud edition.

“We see long-term advantage in allowing those interested in maintaining a private deployment, while still being able to collaborate selectively with partners and others via our Cloud Edition, as an ideal solution for our customers,” says Herz

Via integration with Dropbox, data can be im-ported into the ELN or exported. For example, an image fi le from an instrument stored on a Windows Dropbox folder will sync to the cloud and be avail-able to the user for inclusion into an ELN experi-ment. The iPad camera is used for direct image capture into Irisnote; the voice recording compo-nent operates similarly. Experiments can be shared with specifi c users, and messages can be posted with links to experiments (Figure 5).

Herz goes on to say that “The advent of tablets is transformational in the ELN market. Although many companies have, over the years, tried to replace paper lab notebooks, this problem hasn’t yet been defi nitively solved. In our view, this is because electronic solutions have not truly solved the user interface problem in a way that makes entry of information easy, intuitive and approach-able by researchers. Tablets are the fi rst form-fac-tor substitute for paper that addresses the physical constraints in the lab. On top of this, it must be a user interface that delivers.”

The explosive growth of tablet computing has taken many by surprise, not just the ELN suppli-

ers. Now in the honeymoon phase of the merger of ELN and tablets, many approaches will be tried to see what will be accepted and what will offer prac-tical benefi ts to users. It might be a full-functional monolithic App. It might be a series of focused Apps. It might be both — or something else. No one knows, but at least we are starting to see sup-pliers testing the waters.

The consumer market has spoken that mobility and touch interfaces are here to stay. Now, we just need to make the marriage last in the laboratory.

Michael Elliott is chief executive offi cer of Atrium Research & Consulting. He may be reached at editor@Scientifi cComputing.com

ELN

Figure 4: Irisnote main page: this fully-functional client on the iPad supports data entry, collaboration, signatures and search.

Figure 5: Irisnote — Posting Status Messages. Experiments can be shared with specific users and messages can be posted with links to experiments

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