A novel quantitative assessment method to detect effects of essential tremor on static handwriting

Essential Tremor (ET) manifests itself in people in the form of uncontrolled shaking, most notably during skeletal muscle usage. Severity of ET is commonly assessed through a set of clinical handwriting tests, the subjective analyses of which limit resolution and availability. To address this, our group is pursuing objective and computerized metrics to assess and quantify the extent of tremor in pre-existing static writing samples. In the current study, we tested these metrics by comparing unaffected writing samples with writing affected by artificially-induced tremor. Our findings suggest that these metrics can be utilized for assessment, leading to a toolset for objective monitoring of static handwriting changes associated with ET symptoms.