Dysgraphia detection through machine learning

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 21541 - 11
• Main Authors: Drotár, Peter, Dobeš, Marek
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 09.12.2020; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/166/987; 692/308/2778; Adolescent; Agraphia - diagnosis; Algorithms; Case-Control Studies; Child; Data Accuracy; Female; Handedness; Handwriting; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Learning algorithms; Machine Learning; Male; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Well being
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-78611-9

Dysgraphia, a disorder affecting the written expression of symbols and words, negatively impacts the academic results of pupils as well as their overall well-being. The use of automated procedures can make dysgraphia testing available to larger populations, thereby facilitating early intervention for those who need it. In this paper, we employed a machine learning approach to identify handwriting deteriorated by dysgraphia. To achieve this goal, we collected a new handwriting dataset consisting of several handwriting tasks and extracted a broad range of features to capture different aspects of handwriting. These were fed to a machine learning algorithm to predict whether handwriting is affected by dysgraphia. We compared several machine learning algorithms and discovered that the best results were achieved by the adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) algorithm. The results show that machine learning can be used to detect dysgraphia with almost 80% accuracy, even when dealing with a heterogeneous set of subjects differing in age, sex and handedness.