Handwriting Process Variables Discriminating Mild Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

This study's aims were (a) to examine kinematically the handwriting process of persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), compared with those with mild Alzheimer's disease and healthy controls; (b) to assess the importance of these measures for the differentiation of the groups; and (c) to assess characteristics of the handwriting process across different functional tasks. Thirty-one persons with MCI, 22 with mild Alzheimer's disease, and 41 healthy controls performed functional tasks while using a computerized system. We found significant differences between the groups in almost all measures, with the MCI group assuming a position between the other groups. Temporal measures were higher and pressure was lower in more cognitively deteriorated groups. Information gathered about kinematic measures, together with cognitive functioning, allowed us to classify 69% to 72% of the participants correctly, although the classification for the MCI group was relatively poor.

A computerized multidimensional measurement of mental workload via handwriting analysis

“…Our research hypotheses were that differences would be found between writing under high and under low mental workload, with pressure, temporal, angular velocity, and spatial measures obtained by a computerized system. On the basis of previous results concerning detection of clinical pathologies and deception (Luria & Rosenblum, 2010;Werner et al, 2006), we predicted that writing under high mental workload would affect both handwriting measures (the mean values of each measure) and their variability (the SD values of each measure). However, because there was very little information about the effects of mental workload on the handwriting behaviors measured in this study (when numbers rather than words and sentences were written), we hypothesized differences between handwriting measures with no specific direction.…”

“…Previous studies have indicated that a computerized system of objective measures of the handwriting process may be sensitive to dis-automatization (e.g., Teulings, 2001;Tucha, Laufkotter, Mecklinger, Klein, & Lange, 2001;Werner, Rosenblum, Bar-On, Heinik, & Korczyn, 2006). Specifically, it has been found that such computerized measures are sensitive to cognitive deterioration during the various stages of Alzheimer's disease .…”

Analyse automatique de l’écriture manuscrite en ligne pour la détection précoce des pathologies neurodégénératives

“…Toutes ces personnes ont été invitées à copier, sur une tablette Wacom, un numéro de téléphone, une liste d'articles d'épicerie (mots), à remplir un chèque, à copier les lettres de l'alphabet hébreu, ainsi qu'un paragraphe de 107 caractères [5].…”

A Preliminary Review of Behavioural Biometrics for Health Monitoring in the Elderly

“…Handwriting signals have been used for cognitive impairment detection. For instance, handwriting skill degradation and Alzheimer's disease (AD) appear to be significantly correlated (Forbes, Shanks and Venneri, 2004) and some handwriting aspects can be good indicators for its diagnosis (Neils-Strunjas et al, 2006) or help differentiate between mild Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment (Werner et al, 2006). As demonstrated in Faundez- , the visual inspection of the pen down images suggest a progressive degree of impairment, where drawing becomes more disorganized and the three dimensions effect of the drawing (a house) is only achieved in the mild case.…”