Aging can be seen and read. Yes, because the way you write also changes over time and this change could become a valuable tool for intercepting or remotely monitoring patients with neurological problems, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. This is what a team of Italian researchers suggests, which on the pages of Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience presents an artificial intelligence system capable of classifying handwritten texts according to age. A similar system could allow it to be used as a remote monitoring for people with neurological problems, which are also reflected in the way you write. But in addition to telemedicine, the creators of this system also open up to possible uses in different fields: such as the historical one, for example.
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Writing as a reflection of cognitive activity
The idea behind the project, coordinated by Antonio Suppa of the Human Neuroscience Department of Sapienza University of Rome, is that the way we write is a marker of our biological functions. At least indirectly, being the reflection of the cognitive and motor activity of the central nervous system, where we speak of a writing network, explain the authors, to underline the contribution of several brain areas to such an apparently easy task. .
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An age reference system
Starting from here, the researchers built a reference system of writing by age group, having more or less young healthy participants write their name and surname several times on a sheet of paper (156 right-handed, divided into three different age groups) . Subsequently they fed the images of these writings – sent via smartphone to researchers – to an artificial intelligence: an algorithm and a neural network capable of measuring and classifying the different ways of writing.
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But how does handwriting change as we age? For example – explained Suppa – the width of the characters tends to decrease and in general the ability to write by hand worsens over the years. Artificial intelligence was able, on the basis of an objective analysis of the writings, to capture these differences, discriminating the various manuscripts by age group (with different accuracies between the different classes).
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A telemedicine tool?
According to the researchers, a similar system could become a useful telemedicine tool in the neurological field, all the more so now that the pandemic has highlighted the importance of lightening health systems by also enhancing remote monitoring. Handwriting alterations, such as micrography and agraphy (but not only) are often found in patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and the algorithms could be useful in discriminating signs of physiological aging from indications potentially related to diseases such as these. But not only: “It is a simple, ecological, low cost and easy to use method in various fields”, said Simone Scardapane, co-author of the study: “In addition to the significant implications in the neurological field, it can contribute to for example, the historical dating of a certain document, thanks to the automatic evaluation of the age of the person who wrote it. Furthermore, in the medical-legal field it could facilitate the dating of a will at the time of drafting or signing “.