Graphomotor and Handwriting Disabilities Rating Scale (GHDRS): towards complex and objective assessment

ABSTRACT

Graphomotor and handwriting disabilities (GD and HD, respectively) could significantly reduce children’s quality of life. Effective remediation depends on proper diagnosis; however, current approaches to diagnosis and assessment of GD and HD have several limitations and knowledge gaps, e.g. they are subjective, they do not facilitate identification of specific manifestations, etc. The aim of this work is to introduce a new scale (GHDRS – Graphomotor and Handwriting Disabilities Rating Scale) that will enable experts to perform objective and complex computer-aided diagnosis and assessment of GD and HD. The scale supports quantification of 17 manifestations associated with the process/product of drawing/handwriting. The whole methodology of GHDRS design is made maximally transparent so that it could be adapted for other languages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The whole database is available upon a request sent to the corresponding author.

Code availability

The handwriting/drawing data were recorded using the HandAQUS acquisition software (Mucha, Mekyska, Zvoncak, Galaz, & Smekal, 2022). The majority of the handwriting/drawing features could be extracted using the Python library handwriting-features (v 1.0.1) (Galaz, Mucha, Zvoncak, & Mekyska, 2022), and the rest of them could be extracted employing the iDeLog toolbox (Ferrer, Diaz, Carmona-Duarte, & Plamondon, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under project no. 18-16835S (Research of advanced developmental dysgraphia diagnosis and rating methods based on quantitative analysis of online handwriting and drawing) and partly by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, project no. TL03000287 (Software for advanced diagnosis of graphomotor disabilities), grants PID2020-113242RB-I00 and PID2019-109099RB-C41 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER EU.