As part of their Digital and Frontier Technologies for Health Program, the Department of Science and Technology – The Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (DOST-PCHRD) allotted over PHP 3.2 million funding for a tool that can determine handwriting problems in children.

This tool is called i-SULAT which stands for Intelligent Stroke, Utilization, Learning, Assessment, and Testing. According to Department of Science and Technology (DOST) Secretary Fortunato de la Peña, this aims to create an i-SULAT system which is an intelligent and unified handwriting tool that can solve problems related to inter-tool scoring variations, inconsistency, incongruence, and assessment time.

He said that the estimated range of occurrence of handwriting issues in developing children is 5% to 25%. “Handwriting is still the most immediate form of graphic communication and failure to attain handwriting competency during the school-age year results in far-reaching negative effects on both academic success and self-esteem,” he said in a pre-recorded report aired last Friday.

In the pre-recorded report, he also explained that i-SULAT aims to define a reference normative database of Filipino school-aged children’s handwriting using the traditional tools such as the test of visual-motor skills (TVMS), Minnesota Handwriting Assessment (MHA), and Evaluation Tool of Children’s Handwriting (ETCH) which can be used to assess and evaluate with or without impairments.

The tool also aims to determine significant handwriting parameters for a quantitative assessment of children’s handwriting, and develop an intelligent pen equipped with the i-SULAT system, a software-based handwriting assessment system, that can be utilized as an alternative method and unified tool for continuous assessment and evaluation of children’s handwriting.

With this project, its system will be compared to the conventional children’s handwriting and assessment tools.

The database from this project will be used as a future reference for analyzing handwriting assessment of young individuals with medical, psychological, and neurological conditions such as Dyslexia, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Parkinson’s Disease.

According to de la Peña, this project will run from April 2022 to June 2024 and will be headed by Edison Roxas from the Electronics Engineering Department of the University of Santo Tomas.

Source: https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1169597, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UewtG1Oz1GE