Sonification of pre and post rehabilitation writing

Handwriting is considered a silent movement since the friction of the pen on the paper does not produce sound and generally it is examined by visual analysis starting from the written trace. Recently, many studies were carried out on writing acquisition performed by means of digitizing tablets that allow objective quantitative kinematic analyses of the writing quality. Duration, length, velocity, legibility, direction of letters and numbers of strokes or components are the typical kinematic parameters of handwriting movements that provide information about the development level achieved by a subject and they can be also used in the evaluation of a handwriting rehabilitation treatment. In this work a new technique for the assessment of the handwriting, useful also in the evaluation of a rehabilitation program, based on writing sonification is proposed. This technique is suitable for silent movements such as writing and it is able to help an external examiner to evaluate hidden features in order to better understand movement characteristics. The sound was associated to the handwriting velocity profile of children with handwriting problems. In order to examine the goodness of this technique, thirteen volunteers listened two different sounds generated before andafter rehabilitation, and compared their fluency. The results showed that sounds associated to different handwriting could help to distinguish between good writing and not.