WILTSHIRE Police is the first force in the world to try out a state-of-the-art digital pen.

Wiltshire agreed to be the guinea pig for Hewlett Packard which has developed the pen.

Eight traffic officers used the digital pen in a six-week trial period and encountered some teething problems.

Hewlett Packard aims to develop the pen and its software with the hope that it will be used by police forces and other organisations in the future.

In the trial Wiltshire police officers used the pen for issuing fixed penalty notices to motorists.

Hewlett Packard developed a fixed penalty form for officers to write on using the pen.

The officers wrote out the details on the forms as they normally would do but when they returned to the police station the details transferred electronically to a computer when the pen was put into a cradle.

The forms that the officers filled out were sent to the central ticket office at Chippenham for administrators to check the details against the electronic versions.

The normal process for getting the information to the central ticket office is for all the fixed penalty notices to be sent in the internal mail and the administrators have to input each form into a computer.

During the trial 117 notices were completed of which some 52 per cent were totally accurate when transferred electronically. This figure rose to 65 per cent later in the trial.

Discrepancies occurred if the writing on the forms was joined up, as the technology recognised only capital letters, or if certain numbers were misread.

The discrepancies were corrected when administrators checked the computer forms against the manual forms.

Traffic officer Sergeant Craig Hardy, who took part in the trial, said: "The pen is quite chunky and the cap doesn't fit on the other end while in use but otherwise I had no problem using it.

"Out of the eight officers who used the pen only one person found it hard to write with, due to its large size. I dropped my pen on the road a couple of times and it was left in a hot car for hours on end, neither of which caused any damage so the pens are pretty robust.

"The new smaller form was no problem although you have to write very clearly without joining up your letters to ensure the letter recognition system works accurately, which might irritate some officers!

"I think the whole pilot project is a good idea but will need a bit of fine tuning. It won't save us any time but I can see benefits for the staff in the central ticket office to have the data already on their system rather than having to wait several days for us to send the forms to them in the internal mail system."

Pam Pepler, fixed penalty notice officer at the central ticket office, said: "Some of the screens contained inaccurate data where the writing recognition hadn't worked and then I had to await the arrival of the paper forms before being able to make amendments. However it was nice to have the data on the system already, rather than opening a despatch bag containing hundreds of tickets and having to start processing them all from scratch."

Max Phesse, manager of the central ticket office, said he would like to see a 75 per cent accuracy rate before the digital pen technology was put into use.

Adam Croft, of Hewlett Packard, said he believed the company could make the digital pen technology at least 75 per cent accurate.

He said: "We now have a much better understanding of the whole policing process. We have come away with significant information about policing needs and how they fit with this type of system and we will feed all this back to our people."