For Assistive Technologists

If you work in accessibility services, assistive technology, or student accommodations, this page is for you. It explains where the INQ smartpen fits in your toolkit, what the research says, and why it is one of the lowest-effort devices you will ever deploy. There is no better way to value an INQ Smartpen than to use it yourself. Please visit the bottom of this page to learn how you may obtain a free evaluation INQ smartpen for your institution.

The situation you already know

More students than ever arrive with documented challenges: learning disabilities, ADHD, processing disorders, physical limitations. In national student-survey data, nearly one Canadian university student in three now self-reports at least one disability, up from fewer than one in ten a decade ago. The accommodation letters keep coming; accessibility teams rarely grow to match. Every device you recommend has to work, quickly, for many students at once. There is no time to babysit any of them.

The note-taking problem

For many of these students, the hardest moment of the school day is the lecture itself. Listening, understanding and writing at the same time is exactly the combination their challenge makes most difficult. The student who tries to write everything down loses the thread of the lecture. The student who just listens walks out with nothing to study from.

What the smartpen changes: notes are no longer a one-shot event

The INQ smartpen and its app (Android and iOS) synchronize what the student hears to what the student writes, in real time. This is true when the student is taking notes in text. It is also true when the student is drawing diagrams or capturing other non-textual information.

If at a given point in time a student is busily copying a diagram off the lecturer's board, the audio will sync perfectly with what the lecturer was saying, at exactly that same point in time. When the student later replays the session, they will again hear the lecturer's own words as he or she describes the material being delivered.

That changes the task. In class, the student only captures the highlights, at the pace and in the manner that works best for them. Later, at their own leisure, they re-listen to the lecture and fill in what did not make it onto the page: in one sitting or thirty, the same evening or the week before the exam. The pressure of catching every detail in the moment is gone, because the moment is no longer the only chance.

The outcome of this process is a set of complete, high-quality notes in the student's own handwriting. Research has consistently tied note quality to exam performance: in one well-known study, the quality of a student's lecture notes was the single significant predictor of test results (Peverly et al., 2007), and meta-analyses show the biggest gains come from taking notes and revisiting them rather than from the first pass alone (Kobayashi, 2006). Recent EEG research from NTNU in Norway adds a further reason to keep the notes handwritten: writing by hand engages far more elaborate brain connectivity than typing, in patterns associated with memory formation (van der Meer & van der Weel, 2024).

We can offer no promises about improvements in grades. It is, however, our assertion that a smartpen removes a bottleneck that prevents students from producing the high-quality notes which have been demonstrated to result in better outcomes.

A tool students will actually use

You have seen devices abandoned in a drawer because they marked their user as different. The INQ smartpen looks and writes like an ordinary pen, and the companion device is the phone every student already carries. There is nothing on the desk to explain, so the tool that helps is also a tool the student is comfortable being seen with.

Your side of the equation

We know the device is only half of your decision. The other half is what it costs you in evaluation, setup, training and maintenance. Honestly, not much:

• It leverages hardware you already have. The student's own phone is the recorder, screen and sync engine. Nothing for IT to purchase, image or manage; no accounts to provision; no licensing.
• Setup takes minutes. Install the free INQ app (iOS or Android), pair over Bluetooth, write. That is the whole rollout.
• Writing works without the phone; audio does not. The pen captures pen strokes on its own, holding them in built-in memory until a phone is next available, so a forgotten or banned phone never costs the student their written notes. Audio is a different matter, and this is a technical point worth understanding precisely: the only microphone in the system is the one inside the smartphone. Recording the lecture therefore requires the phone to be present and paired over Bluetooth. A student who wants the replay-and-fill-in workflow described above must bring the phone to class.
• Maintenance is the good kind of boring. USB-C charging (about 10 hours of writing per charge), standard D1 ink cartridges, notebooks archived in the app when finished.
• Funding applications are familiar territory. Many of our customers use provincial assistive-technology funding, including student-aid bursaries and workplace-accommodation programs, and we gladly provide the quotes and documentation the application needs. Training, where wanted, is often reimbursable under the same programs. Details on our FAQ.
• One Canadian supplier. Purchase orders, net-30 terms for approved institutions, Canadian-dollar invoicing, fast free delivery, and support in French and English. The particulars are on our institutional purchasing page.

Try one before you recommend one