Profiling Handwriting-Process Deviations in Developmental Dysgraphia: An Open, Normatively-Referenced Instrument

Abstract

Online handwriting captured on digitizing tablets yields hundreds of kinematic, temporal, spatial, and dynamic features. These features are rarely organized into interpretable, reusable constructs, and, although standardized tests norm the handwritten product, no openly available instrument places a child's handwriting process relative to a verified-typical reference. We introduce and validate an open measurement instrument for profiling handwriting-process deviations in children with developmental dysgraphia from sentence-level online handwriting. The instrument comprises (i)~a literature-only vocabulary, fixed before any cohort analysis, organizing 136 online-handwriting features into 12 handwriting-process domains, and (ii)~an age- and sex-adjusted normative reference framework, fit on verified-typical children only, that turns those features into a 12-axis deviation profile with per-child bootstrap uncertainty. We establish its measurement properties on the DiaGraMo cohort (N=257 Czech children aged 8--12; 110 verified-typical, 147 with dysgraphia): the vocabulary is structurally coherent, and the reference is calibrated, parsimonious, and leakage-free. On the same cohort, five of twelve domains separate the groups at BH~$q<.05$ (Cliff's~$\delta$ +0.19 to +0.51), on spatial, temporal, and pen-orientation processes, and 96.5\% of participant~$\times$~domain scores have a bootstrap CI narrower than one z-unit. No classifier is trained: the instrument reports uncertainty-aware deviation scores rather than a diagnostic label, and its outlier rate is not a diagnostic rate. The vocabulary, the analysis code, and an open reference implementation that scores new participants are all openly released, giving handwriting and dysgraphia researchers a reusable, validated instrument for situating individual children against a normative reference.