Analysis of Handwriting Kinematic Parameters in Italian Children

Abstract

Handwriting represents the integration of linguistic, psychomotor and biomechanical processes and deserves great attention from educators and health practitioners for its closely interaction with maturation, development and learning. It is well known that difficulty in this area can have negative effects on academic achievement and children with handwriting problems typically have difficulties to keep up with the amount of written work required during elementary school years. In recent years, the acquisition of handwriting movements through digitizing tablets allows objective quantitative kinematic analyses of writing quality and has been used to characterize the handwriting process [1] by measuring parameters extracted from the basic elements of writing, such as components and strokes. In this paper we investigated a series of kinematic parameters such as length, duration, mean and peak velocity of components and strokes of handwriting movements recorded by a digital tablet in 105 mainstream school-aged children, examining how these parameters change as schooling proceeds. Each student had to produce a repetitive sequence of cursive uno and to copy a short meaningful sentence both as accurately and as fast as possible. Main results show an increase, as schooling advances, in component and stroke mean and peak horizontal and curvilinear velocities and a decrease of number of strokes to realize each letter. In particular, a better fluency could be measured by evaluating the increment of horizontal drag velocity.