Online handwriting, signature and touch dynamics: tasks and potential applications in the field of security and health

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in online handwriting and touch dynamics, highlighting their applications in security and health, emphasizing tasks that provide rich behavioral signals for user identification and health monitoring.

Contribution

It summarizes recent findings and applications of online handwriting and drawing tasks that utilize digitizing devices, focusing on those with significant impact and competitive results.

Findings

Handwriting signals offer rich behavioral data for security and health.

Digitizing devices enable complex analysis of in-air and on-surface movements.

Selected tasks show high discrimination power in practical applications.

Abstract

Background: An advantageous property of behavioural signals ,e.g. handwriting, in contrast to morphological ones, such as iris, fingerprint, hand geometry, etc., is the possibility to ask a user for a very rich amount of different tasks. Methods: This article summarises recent findings and applications of different handwriting and drawing tasks in the field of security and health. More specifically, it is focused on on-line handwriting and hand-based interaction, i.e. signals that utilise a digitizing device (specific devoted or general-purpose tablet/smartphone) during the realization of the tasks. Such devices permit the acquisition of on-surface dynamics as well as in-air movements in time, thus providing complex and richer information when compared to the conventional pen and paper method. Conclusions: Although the scientific literature reports a wide range of tasks and applications, in this paper, we summarize only those providing competitive results (e.g. in terms of discrimination power) and having a significant impact in the field.