Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / In this investigation personal styles of handwriting will be analyzed in grades six, seven, eight, and nine. It is the purpose of this study to discover: (1) the percentage of pupils who develop personal styles; (2) reasons why certain pupils develop particular styles; (3) speed and legibility in regard to these styles; and (4) influencing factors such as intelligence, motor capacity, and personality traits in regard to these styles.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

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This thesis reports the results of a large study to evaluate the kinetics of pencil grasp patterns in terms of speed and legibility of handwriting of children in Grade 4. Current clinical practice as recent as 2008 suggests that teachers identify the dynamic tripod pencil grasp as an optimal pencil grasp for handwriting. Research findings had suggested that three other pencil grasps may be functional for handwriting, though there was still inconclusive evidence upon which to base clinical practice. The purpose of the present study was to: assess the impact of pencil grasp on the speed and legibility of handwriting; to determine the effect of grasp on speed and legibility following a 10-minute copy task intended to induce fatigue; and to describe the axial and grip forces of the four pencil grasps. 120 children were assessed, completing a standardized handwriting assessment before and after a 10-minute copy task. The participants utilized an instrumented pen and wrote on a digitizing tablet, which measured, respectively, the axial and grip forces associated with their grasp patterns. Pencil grasp was not found to impact the speed or legibility of the written product in either short or long duration copy tasks. Fatigue decreased the legibility of the product across all pencil grasps but increased the speed across all pencil grasps equally. Grip and axial forces were only different in grasps with an adducted thumb and mainly during the initial assessment. Collectively, these results suggest that four mature grasps are equally functional for handwriting in children of this age. These findings contradict common clinical impressions that the dynamic tripod pencil grasp is optimal.

This thesis reports the results of a large study to evaluate the kinetics of pencil grasp patterns in terms of speed and legibility of handwriting of children in Grade 4. Current clinical practice as recent as 2008 suggests that teachers identify the dynamic tripod pencil grasp as an optimal pencil grasp for handwriting. Research findings had suggested that three other pencil grasps may be functional for handwriting, though there was still inconclusive evidence upon which to base clinical practice. The purpose of the present study was to: assess the impact of pencil grasp on the speed and legibility of handwriting; to determine the effect of grasp on speed and legibility following a 10-minute copy task intended to induce fatigue; and to describe the axial and grip forces of the four pencil grasps. 120 children were assessed, completing a standardized handwriting assessment before and after a 10-minute copy task. The participants utilized an instrumented pen and wrote on a digitizing tablet, which measured, respectively, the axial and grip forces associated with their grasp patterns. Pencil grasp was not found to impact the speed or legibility of the written product in either short or long duration copy tasks. Fatigue decreased the legibility of the product across all pencil grasps but increased the speed across all pencil grasps equally. Grip and axial forces were only different in grasps with an adducted thumb and mainly during the initial assessment. Collectively, these results suggest that four mature grasps are equally functional for handwriting in children of this age. These findings contradict common clinical impressions that the dynamic tripod pencil grasp is optimal.

The sounds generated by a writing instrument ("pen-chant") provide a rich and under-utilized source of information for pattern recognition. We examine the feasibility of recognition of handwritten cursive text, exclusively through an analysis of acoustic emissions. We design and implement a family of recognizers using a template matching approach, with templates and similarity measures derived variously from: smoothed amplitude signal with fixed resolution, discrete sequence of magnitudes obtained from peaks in the smoothed amplitude signal, and ordered tree obtained from a scale space signal representation. Test results are presented for recognition of isolated lowercase cursive characters and for whole words. We also present qualitative results for recognizing gestures such as circling, scratch-out, check-marks, and hatching. Our first set of results, using samples provided by the author, yield recognition rates of over 70% (alphabet) and 90% (26 words), with a confidence of 8%, based solely on acoustic emissions. Our second set of results uses data gathered from nine writers. These results demonstrate that acoustic emissions are a rich source of information, usable - on their own or in conjunction with image-based features - to solve pattern recognition problems. In future work, this approach can be applied to writer identification, handwriting and gesture-based computer input technology, emotion recognition, and temporal analysis of sketches. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-27 08:56:53.895