IEEE Trans Haptics. 2021 Jul-Sep;14(3):626-634. doi: 10.1109/TOH.2021.3068786. Epub 2021 Sep 9.
Handwriting is an essential skill for developing sensorimotor and intellectual skills in children. Handwriting constitutes a complex activity relying on cognitive, visual-motor, memory and linguistic abilities, and is therefore challenging to master, especially for children with learning difficulties such as those with cognitive, sensorimotor or memory deficits. Recently-emerged haptic guidance systems have a potential to facilitate the acquisition of handwriting skills in both adults and children. In this paper we present a longitudinal experimental study that examined the effects of haptic guidance to improve handwriting skills in children with cognitive and fine motor delays as a function of the handwriting complexity in terms of visual familiarity and haptic difficulty. A haptic-based handwriting training platform that provides haptic guidance along the trajectory of a handwriting task was utilized. 12 children with cognitive and fine motor delays defined in terms of intellectual difficulty (IQ score) and mild motor difficulty in pincer grasp control, participated in the study. Children were divided into two groups, a target group and a control group. The target group completed haptic-guided training and pencil-and-paper test whereas the control group took only the pencil-and-paper test without any training. A total of 32 handwriting tasks was used in the study where 16 tasks were used for training while the entire 32 tasks were completed for evaluation. Results demonstrated that the target group performed significantly better than the control group for handwriting tasks that are visually familiar but haptically difficult (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, p 0.01). An improvement was also seen in the performance of untrained tasks as well as trained tasks (Spearman's linear correlation coefficient, 0.667; p = 0.05). In addition to confirming that haptic guidance can significantly improve motor functions, this study revealed a significant effect of task difficulty (visual familiarity and haptic complexity) on the effectiveness of haptic guidance for handwriting skill acquisition for children with cognitive and fine motor delays.
书写是儿童发展感觉运动和智力技能的基本技能。书写是一种复杂的活动，依赖于认知、视觉运动、记忆和语言能力，因此很难掌握，尤其是对于有学习困难的儿童，如认知、感觉运动或记忆缺陷的儿童。最近出现的触觉引导系统有可能促进成人和儿童书写技能的掌握。在本文中，我们进行了一项纵向实验研究，考察了触觉引导在提高认知和精细运动迟缓儿童的书写技能方面的效果，该研究考虑了书写的视觉熟悉度和触觉难度的复杂性。利用了一种基于触觉的书写训练平台，该平台在书写任务的轨迹上提供触觉引导。12 名认知和精细运动迟缓的儿童（根据智力困难（智商得分）和轻度运动困难在钳子抓握控制方面定义）参加了这项研究。儿童分为两组，目标组和对照组。目标组完成触觉引导训练和纸笔测试，而对照组仅进行纸笔测试而不进行任何训练。研究共使用了 32 项书写任务，其中 16 项用于训练，而整个 32 项任务用于评估。结果表明，对于视觉熟悉但触觉困难的书写任务（Wilcoxon 符号秩检验，p<0.01），目标组的表现明显优于对照组。未训练任务和训练任务的表现也有所提高（Spearman 线性相关系数，0.667;p=0.05）。除了确认触觉引导可以显著改善运动功能外，这项研究还揭示了任务难度（视觉熟悉度和触觉复杂性）对有认知和精细运动迟缓的儿童书写技能习得的触觉引导效果的显著影响。
