Towards a Digitized Protocol based on Handwriting for the Assessment of Neurodegenerative Disorders

Kinematic features of the handwriting process are promising for discriminating patients probably affected by neurodegenerative disorders from healthy controls and potentially for identifying the stage of the illness. Many tasks have been proposed and tested, however the scientific community still lacks a complete protocol able to collect different traits useful to the research community and at the same time to be of real use for doctors in their daily activities. This paper collects all the different tasks already applied and proposes a protocol for handwritten traits acquisition to be integrated into standardized cognitive and functional tests already accepted, tested and used by the medical community working on the assessment of neurodegenerative diseases.