Age Group Discrimination via Free Handwriting Indicators.

Ageing is a physiological phenomenon associated with cognitive and functional decline which, in the long term, could hamper the execution of daily life activities and threaten both social and independent life. The onset of chronic diseases can intensify this process, increasing the risk of hospitalisation and admission to long term care. This represents a significant burden on public health and reduces the quality of life of those affected.

Spiral drawing analysis with a smart ink pen to identify Parkinson's disease fine motor deficits.

Introduction: Since the uptake of digitizers, quantitative spiral drawing assessment allowed gaining insight into motor impairments related to Parkinson's disease. However, the reduced naturalness of the gesture and the poor user-friendliness of the data acquisition hamper the adoption of such technologies in the clinical practice. To overcome such limitations, we present a novel smart ink pen for spiral drawing assessment, intending to better characterize Parkinson's disease motor symptoms.

A smart ink pen for spiral drawing analysis in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Handwriting skills could be highly impaired in patients affected by Parkinson's disease (PD), and for this reason its analysis had always been considered relevant. In handwriting assessment, Archimedes spiral drawing is one of the most proposed tasks, due to its peculiar shape and ease of execution. In the last decades, digitizing tablets had been widely employed for the evaluation of the spiral performance, providing a cheap and non-invasive way to gather quantitative information, to be combined with the classical clinical examination.