Influence of Mother Tongue on Dynamic Handwriting Features in Primary School

Handwriting is an essential fine motor skill in school-aged children and plays a crucial role for educational development and autonomy of everyday life. To analyze hand-writing movement an objective quantitative kinematic analysis can be performed by using digital tablets. Through this tech-nology it was possible to identify a lot of parameters useful to characterize the handwriting process. In order to study the influence of mother tongue on the dy-namic of handwriting in primary school, we examined the writing response of 42 non-native speakers and compared their characteristics with those of 131 Italian mother tongue chil-dren. All children undertook one repetitive sequence of le and an Italian sentence written in two different ways: as accurately as and as fast as possible. The results showed that the differences between native and non-native speakers were not significant in the repetitive se-quence while a clear influence of mother tongue was present only in the third grade for the sentence tasks

A New Approach for Objective Evaluation of Writing Quality

The approach to evaluate handwriting quality is usually based on the use of check-lists and scales regarding qualitative, postural and pen grasp aspects that are detected during task execution and through a visual analysis of written texts. Nevertheless, this approach lacks of objectivity and all the parameters have the same weight. On the other hand, objective evaluation methods focusing on the qualitative approach are available in the literature. For example, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a technique that allows to organise complex relationships between elements into a system based on subjective judgements. In this paper we present an innovative evaluation scale, based on a new neuromotor model of handwriting production, which associates a specific weight to each parameter during the calculation of a quality score. The scale allows teachers, speech therapists and all those interested in diagnostic and rehabilitative phase to identify subjects who show some handwriting difficulties compared to the average performance of their peers. The new approach was applied to two groups of students, following different teaching methods, in order to evaluate suitably weighted aspects of handwriting quality

Implementation of IBM Watson in a decision support system for temporomandibular disorders

Clinical Decision Support Systems may benefit from cognitive computing technologies thanks to both their ability to process natural language and to manage large knowledge bases. We present the experience of implementing a CDSS for supporting the diagnosis of Temporo-Mandibular Disorders using IBM Watson services. We found that the training guided by experts is a key factor and that, despite the generally positive feedbacks, the application best target are untrained professionals