It forms an important part of graphonomics, which became established after the "International Workshop on Handwriting Movement Analysis" in 1982 in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
See the "Annotated Bibliography in Pen Computing and Handwriting Recognition" by Jean Renard Ward (http://users.erols.com/rwservices/biblio.html).
While sampling rates of 20 Hz would theoretically suffice, up-sampling will be needed to properly visualize the Lissajous-like handwriting and drawing strokes.
Higher-than-necessary sampling rates such as 100 Hz are preferred as this would also allow low-pass filtering or smoothed data with reduced equipment and quantization noise by factor √100/20 = √5.
Handwriting movement measurement systems can capture: Optionally, digitizers can deliver the orientation of the pen barrel relative to the tablet: Ideally, each set of coordinates should be sampled simultaneously and at a fixed frequency, and include times stamps per coordinate to correct non-isochronous sampling.
Handwriting movements are being studied from many disciplines including kinesiology, human movement science, biomechanics of the hand, fine motor control, handedness, human-computer interaction, visuomotor control, visual feedback, goal-directed movements, drawing, experimental psychology, psychiatry, extrapyramidal symptoms (EPS) or movement side effects due to medication, neurology, movement disorders, Parkinson's disease, dystonia, writer's cramp, physiotherapy, remedial handwriting instruction, occupational therapy, child development, developmental disorders, education, elementary education, home schooling, reeducation, linguistics, language, communication, stuttering, forensic document examination, document analysis, forensic document examination or questioned document examination, signature verification and identification, handwriting image analysis, computer science, artificial intelligence, handwriting recognition, etc.
Even today, it is a major accomplishment to make software available as a package that can be installed on an unknown computer and can be used after a brief familiarization time by other users who have not been involved.
Over the last several years, software packages have appeared on the market that can be used by many other researchers interested in the field of handwriting movement analysis.
The first handwriting movement analysis offered for sale (around 1980) was CSWin by Science And Motion[7] and developed by Christian Marquardt and Norbert May in Munich, Germany.
The present company focuses on golf training and was established in 2003 and is run by the owner, Christian Marquardt.
Another Handwriting Analysis system is Neuroskill by Verifax, Boulder, Colorado, USA, which was founded in 1990 by Dr. Ruth Shrairman and Alex Landau.
Neuroskill was designed for biometric measurement, security purposes, and Parkinson medication effects and has many applications in movement disorders.
In the process, they applied their technology to biometric measurements as a clinical monitoring tool for physicians investigating neuromuscular diseases.
CFA returns numerical scores and charts expressing stability of the handwriting strokes and the characteristics of the phase distortions in reproducing cursive samples.
Another application was to evaluate persons with critical skills (e.g., airline pilots, bus drivers) for physical and mental performance impairments caused by stress, physiological disorders, and alcohol and drug abuse using their proprietary VeriFax Impairoscope writing instrument.
This last application raised the possibility of using a space-qualified Impairoscope variant to evaluate astronaut performance with respect to the impacts of stress, fatigue, excessive workload, build-up of toxic chemicals within the space habitat, etc.
MovAlyzeR is currently the only handwriting movement analysis software that is certified for Microsoft Windows XP and Vista.
It is used in fields ranging from research in human movement sciences, kinesiology, psychology, education, aging research, psychiatry, neurology, occupational therapy, forensic document examination, computer science (handwriting recognition, signature verification), to educational demonstrations or student projects in these fields.
It is used to study children with dysgraphia, Developmental Coordination Disorders (DCD) and adults with several pathologies as Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Depression, Alzheimer, Parkinson as well as aging effects.
After a complete rewriting to support MS-Windows, eye mouvement recording was added to get insight into reading during writing and information retrieval.
Its evolution is the fruit of collaborations with handwriting researchers, mostly of the psychology lab of the University of Poitiers (Denis Alamargot, Eric lambert, Cyril Perret, Thierry Olive).
The first research publications that mention MedDraw are by Kaplani, Guest, and Fairhurst (2005), and by Glenat, Heutte, Paquet, and Mellier (2005).