DigiClip: activating physical documents

Today many documents are held in parallel as electronic files and as paper based documents. Keeping the properties of both versions in sync is important to assure consistency between the physical and virtual instances of one document. We introduce the DigiClip system that provides a solution to automatically enforce such consistency by converting passive paper documents to active physical documents. The main component of the system is the DigiClip device, a clip with embedded computing, sensing and communication technology that is attached to a paper document. The device is able to supervise the status of the document and to communicate to a software component that supervises the electronic instance of the same document. In this way the DigiClip system enables applications to automatically coordinate properties like integrity and access restrictions and to keep track of changes both of the physical and the virtual document.