Analysis of postures for handwriting on touch screens without using tools

The act of handwriting affected the evolutionary development of humans and still impacts the motor cognition of individuals. However, the ubiquitous use of digital technologies has drastically decreased the number of times we really need to pick a pen up and write on paper. Nonetheless, the positive cognitive impact of handwriting is widely recognized, and a possible way to merge the benefits of handwriting and digital writing is to use suitable tools to write over touchscreens or graphics tablets. In this manuscript, we focus on the possibility of using the hand itself as a writing tool. A novel hand posture named FingerPen is introduced, and can be seen as a grasp performed by the hand on the index finger. A comparison with the most common posture that people tend to assume (i.e. index finger-only exploitation) is carried out by means of a biomechanical model. A conducted user study shows that the FingerPen is appreciated by users and leads to accurate writing traits.

Neuroergonomic Assessment of Developmental Coordination Disorder

Until recently, neural assessments of gross motor coordination could not reliably handle active tasks, particularly in realistic environments, and offered a narrow understanding of motor-cognition. By applying a comprehensive neuroergonomic approach using optical mobile neuroimaging, we demonstrated the broader capability for ecologically relevant neural evaluations for the “difficult-to-diagnose” Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), a motor-learning deficit affecting 5-6% of children with lifelong complications. We confirmed that DCD is not an intellectual, but a motor-cognitive disability, as gross motor /complex tasks revealed neuro-hemodynamic deficits and dysfunction within the right middle and superior frontal gyri of the Prefrontal Cortex. Furthermore, by incorporating behavioral performance, aberrant patterns of neural efficiency in these regions were revealed in DCD children, specifically during motor tasks. Lastly, we provide a framework, evaluating disorder impact in real-world contexts to identify those for whom interventional approaches are most needed and open the door for precision therapies.

Congenital Pulmonary Venolobar Syndrome: Neurodevelopmental Follow-up

Congenital pulmonary venolobar syndrome or infantile scimitar syndrome is a rare congenital cardiopulmonary anomaly and has variable presentation, especially in the neonatal period. It is characterized by partial or total anomalous pulmonary venous return from the right lung along with pulmonary hypoplasia. The infantile form is associated with significant mortality and has a worse prognosis due to severe respiratory insufficiency, cardiac failure, and pulmonary infections. We report an infantile scimitar syndrome diagnosed within few hours of life, which has been followed up for 4 years for the presence of intact survival and without neurodevelopmental disorder in the domains of motor, cognition, communication, personal-social, vision, and hearing.

Conclusion

The conclusion considers two nonliterary performances of kinesic humor. In their respective routines about horse dressage, Jacques Tati and Eddie Izzard play with their audience’s sensorimotor knowledge and kinesic literacy. While speech is absent from Tati’s mime, it is part of Izzard’s show. In both cases, however, motor cognition operates at a pace that is faster than verbal elucidation. These two examples illustrate the ways in which we are able to cognitively process a gesture and respond to it without necessarily knowing how to account verbally for its humorous and effective complexity. The connections between sensorimotor concepts and verbal concepts cannot be taken for granted. The literary artists whose works are discussed in Kinesic Humor were able to play with such connections and communicate about the ever-surprising versatility of human embodied cognition, leading sometimes to laughter, one of the most obviously embodied of all cognitive events.

The kleineWeltentdecker App - A Smartphone-Based Developmental Diary

Today, a vast amount of tools exist to measure development in early childhood in a variety of domains such as motor, cognition, or language. These tools vary in different aspects. Either children are examined by a trained experimenter, or caregivers fill out questionnaires. The tools are applied in the controlled setting of a laboratory or in the children's natural environment. While these tools provide a detailed picture of the current state of children’s development, they are at the same time subject to a number of constraints. The measurement of an individual child's change of different skills over time requires high-density longitudinal assessments. These assessments are time-consuming, often need experts to be performed, and the breadth of developmental domains assessed remains limited. Here, we present a novel tool to assess the development of different skills in different domains, a smartphone-based developmental diary app (the kleineWeltentdecker App, henceforth referred to as the APP. Note that the German expression “kleine Weltententdecker“ can be translated as “young world explorers“.). By using the APP, parents can track changes in their children's skills during development. Here, we report the construction and validation of the questionnaires embedded in the APP as well as the technical details. Empirical validations with children of different age groups confirmed the robustness of the different measures implemented in the APP. In addition, we report a few preliminary findings, for example, on children's communicative development by using preliminary APP data. This substantiates the validity of the assessment. With the APP, we put a portable tool for the longitudinal documentation of individual children’s development in every caregiver's pocket, worldwide.

Hemispheric Network Expression in Parkinson’s Disease: Relationship to Dopaminergic Asymmetries

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by brain metabolic networks, specifically associated with motor and cognitive manifestations. Few studies have investigated network changes in cerebral hemispheres ipsilateral and contralateral to the clinically more affected body side. Objective: We examined hemispheric network abnormalities and their relationship to striatal dopaminergic deficits in PD patients at different stages. Methods: 45 PD patients underwent dual-tracer positron emission tomography (PET) with 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) and 18F-fluorodopa (FDOPA) in a high-resolution PET scanner. In all patients, we computed expression levels for the PD-related motor/cognition metabolic patterns (PDRP/PDCP) as well as putamen/caudate FDOPA uptake values in both hemispheres. Resulting hemispheric measures in the PD group were compared with corresponding healthy control values and assessed across disease stages. Results: Hemispheric PDRP and PDCP expression was significantly elevated contralateral and ipsilateral to the more affected body side in patients with unilateral symptoms (H&Y 1: p < 0.01) and in patients with bilateral limb involvement (H&Y 2-3: p < 0.001; H&Y 4: p < 0.003). Elevations in pattern expression were symmetrical at all disease stages. By contrast, FDOPA uptake in the caudate and putamen was reduced bilaterally (p < 0.002), with lower values on both sides at more advanced disease stages. Hemispheric uptake was asymmetrical in both striatal regions, with lower contralateral values at all disease stages. The magnitude of hemispheric uptake asymmetry was smaller with more advanced disease, reflecting greater change ipsilaterally. Conclusion: Symmetrical network expression in PD represents bilateral functional effects unrelated to nigrostriatal dopaminergic asymmetries.

Gesture errors in left and right hemisphere damaged patients: a behavioural and anatomical study

Objective. Erroneous gesture execution is at the core of motor cognition difficulties in apraxia. While a taxonomy of errors may provide important information about the nature of the disorder, classifications are currently often inconsistent. This study aims to identify the error categories which distinguish apraxic from non-apraxic patients. Method. Two groups of mixed and bucco-facial apraxic patients were compared to non-apraxic, left and right hemisphere damaged patients in tasks tapping the ability to perform transitive and intransitive limb and mouth actions. The errors were analysed and classified into 6 categories relating to content, configuration or movement, spatial or temporal parameters and unrecognisable actions. Results. Although all these error typologies may be observed, the most indicative of mixed apraxia relate to content and configuration, while configuration and unrecognisable/destructured action errors seem to be typical of bucco-facial apraxia. Spatial errors are similar in both apraxic and right brain damaged, non-apraxic patients. A lesion mapping analysis of left-brain damaged patients demonstrates that the error categories (except for spatial errors) are all associated with the fronto-parietal network. Tellingly, content errors are also associated with fronto-insular lesions and movement errors with damage to the paracentral territory (precentral and postcentral gyri). Spatial errors more frequently involve ventral frontal lesions. Conclusions. Bucco-facial and mixed apraxic patients make different types of errors in different types of actions. Not all errors are equally indicative of apraxia. In addition, the various error categories are associated with at least partially different neural correlates.