Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative dementia of old age, and the leading chronic disease contributor to disability and dependence among older people worldwide. Clinically, AD is characterized by a progressive cognitive decline that interferes with the abil-ity to perform the activities of daily living. Handwriting and drawing are complex human activities that entail an intricate blend of cognitive, kinesthetic, and perceptual-motor features.Objective: To compare the kinematic characteristics of handwriting and drawing between patients with AD, patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy controls.Methods: We used a cross-sectional and observational design to assess the kinematic and pressure fea-tures of handwriting and drawing using a computerized system. Participants were asked to copy one sen-tence, write a dictated sentence and an own sentence, copy two and-three dimensions drawings, and to execute the clock drawing test. By means of discriminant analyses, we explored the value of several kin-ematic features in order to classify participants depending on their degree of cognitive functioning.Results: The sample consisted of 52 participants (23 AD, 12 MCI, and 17 healthy controls) with a mean age of 69.7 years (SD=8.11). The degree of correct classification was largely dependent on the nature of the groups to be classified and the specific task, and ranged between 63.5% and 100%. Diagnostic accu-racy based on kinematic measures showed higher specificity values for distinguishing between normal and impaired cognition (MCI and AD), and higher sensitivity was obtained when distinguishing between impaired cognition levels (MCI vs. AD).Conclusion: The kinematic features of writing and drawing procedures, rather than the final product, may be a useful and objective complement to the clinical assessment of patients with cognitive impairment.

Among neural disorders related to movement, essential tremor has the highest prevalence; in fact, it is twenty times more common than Parkinson’s disease. The drawing of the Archimedes’ spiral is the gold standard test to distinguish between both pathologies. The aim of this paper is to select non-linear biomarkers based on the analysis of digital drawings. It belongs to a larger cross study for early diagnosis of essential tremor that also includes genetic information. The proposed automatic analysis system consists in a hybrid solution: Machine Learning paradigms and automatic selection of features based on statistical tests using medical criteria. Moreover, the selected biomarkers comprise not only commonly used linear features (static and dynamic), but also other non-linear ones: Shannon entropy and Fractal Dimension. The results are hopeful, and the developed tool can easily be adapted to users; and taking into account social and economic points of view, it could be very helpful in real complex environments.

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Essential tremor (ET) is a highly prevalent neurological disorder characterized by action-induced tremors involving the hand, voice, head, and/or face. Importantly, hand tremor is present in nearly all forms of ET, resulting in impaired fine motor skills and diminished quality of life. To advance early diagnostic approaches for ET, automated handwriting tasks and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offer an opportunity to develop early essential clinical biomarkers. In this study, we present a novel approach for the early clinical diagnosis and monitoring of ET based on integrating handwriting and neuroimaging analysis. We demonstrate how the analysis of fine motor skills, as measured by an automated Archimedes’ spiral task, is correlated with neuroimaging biomarkers for ET. Together, we present a novel modeling approach that can serve as a complementary and promising support tool for the clinical diagnosis of ET and a large range of tremors.

This paper is focused on nonlinear prediction coding, which consists on the prediction of a speech sample based on a nonlinear combination of previous samples. It is known that in the generation of the glottal pulse, the wave equation does not behave linearly [2], [10], and we model these effects by means of a nonlinear prediction of speech based on a parametric neural network model. This work is centred on the neural net weight's quantization and on the compression gain.

Abstract. This paper summarizes the rationale for proposing the COST-277 "nonlinear speech processing" action, and the work done during these last four years. In addition, future perspectives are described.

The word biometrics comes from the Greek words “bios” (life) and “metrikos” (measure). Strictly speaking, it refers to a science involving the statistical analysis of biological characteristics. Thus, we should refer to biometric recognition of people, as those security applications that analyze human characteristics for identity verification or identification. However, we will use the short term “biometrics” to refer to “biometric recognition of people”. Biometric recognition offers a promising approach for security applications, with some advantages over the classical methods, which depend on something you have (key, card, etc.), or something you know (password, PIN, etc.). A nice property of biometric traits is that they are based on something you are or something you do, so you do not need to remember anything neither to hold any token.

In this paper we propose a new parameterization algorithm based on nonlinear prediction, which is an extension of the classical LPC parameters. The parameters performances are estimated by two different methods: the Arithmetic-Harmonic Sphericity (AHS) and the Auto-Regressive Vector Model (ARVM). Two different methods are proposed for the parameterization based on the Neural Predictive Coding (NPC): classical neural networks initialization and linear initialization. We applied these two parameters to speaker identification. The fist parameters obtained smaller rates. We show for the first parameters how they can be combined with the classical parameters (LPCC, MFCC, etc.) in order to improve the results of only one classical parameterization (MFCC provides 97.55% and MFCC+NPC 98.78%). For the linear initialization, we obtain 100% which is great improvement. This study opens a new way towards different parameterization schemes that offer better accuracy on speaker recognition tasks.