Automated Detection of Children at Risk of Chinese Handwriting Difficulties Using Handwriting Process Information: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Handwriting difficulties (HWDs) in children have adverse effects on their confidence and academic progress. Detecting HWDs is the first crucial step toward clinical or teaching intervention for children with HWDs. To date, how to automatically detect HWDs is still a challenge, although digitizing tablets have provided an opportunity to automatically collect handwriting process information. Especially, to our best knowledge, there is no exploration into the potential of combining machine learning algorithms and the handwriting process information to automatically detect Chinese HWDs in children. To bridge the gap, we first conducted an experiment to collect sample data and then compared the performance of five commonly used classification algorithms (Decision tree, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network, Naïve Bayesian and k-Nearest Neighbor) in detecting HWDs. The results showed that: (1) only a small proportion (13%) of children had Chinese HWDs and each classification model on the imbalanced dataset (39 children at risk of HWDs versus 261 typical children) produced the results that were better than random guesses, indicating the possibility of using classification algorithms to detect Chinese HWDs; (2) the SVM model had the best performance in detecting Chinese HWDs among the five classification models; and (3) the performance of the SVM model, especially its sensitivity, could be significantly improved by employing the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique to handle the class-imbalanced data. This study gains new insights into which handwriting features are predictive of Chinese HWDs in children and proposes a method that can help the clinical and educational professionals to automatically detect children at risk of Chinese HWDs.

Advanced Parametrization of Graphomotor Difficulties in School-Aged Children

“…value; legibility -items 1, 2, and 10, performance time -items 3, 4 and 9, and physical and emotional well-being -items 5-8). Using HPSQ-C brings two important advantages: a) the scale is language independent and therefore well-comparable across studies employed on cohorts coming from different language groups; b) it has already been validated in a couple of previous studies such as [8], [32], [38], [39]. The overall HPSQ-C scores, as well as the final handwritten product, were both examined by experienced psychologists and special educational counsellors.…”

DysDiTect: Dyslexia Identification Using CNN-Positional-LSTM-Attention Modeling with Chinese Dictation Task

“…To facilitate the identification procedure, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is incorporated, particularly in languages with a limited set of letters like English [26]. It is worth noting that dysgraphia identification research [27] has focused predominantly on studying the kinematic and static data of in-process handwriting, both in alphabetic languages and Chinese [28].…”

RALF: an adaptive reinforcement learning framework for teaching dyslexic students

“…Handwritten recognition has developed advanced algorithms in different languages such as Gurumukhi [ 48 ], Devanagari [ 63 ], Urdu [ 62 ], and Persian [ 39 , 57 ]. In addition, some recent research assesses the children's handwriting in different languages such as English [ 81 , 96 ], kanji [ 65 ], and Chinese [ 94 ]. At the same time, they did not provide a procedure to improve their handwriting by graphical education.…”