Analysis of Handwriting for Recognition of Parkinson’s Disease: Current State and New Study

Abstract

One of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is abnormal handwriting caused by motor dysfunction. The development of tablet technology opens up opportunities for an effective analysis of the writing process of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, aimed at supporting medical diagnosis using machine learning methods. Several approaches have been used and presented in the literature that discuss the analysis and understanding of images created during the writing of single words or sentences. In this study, we propose an analysis based on a sequence of sentences, which allows us to assess the evolution of writing over time. The study material consisted of handwriting image samples acquired in a group of 24 patients with PD and 24 healthy controls. The parameterization of the handwriting image samples was carried out using domain knowledge. Using the exhaustive search method, we selected the relevant features for the SVM algorithm performing binary classification. The results obtained were assessed using quality measures, including overall accuracy, which was 91.67%. The results were compared with competitive works on the same subject and seem to be better (a higher level of accuracy with a much smaller number of features than those presented by others).