On the Handwriting Tasks' Analysis to Detect Fatigue

TL;DR

This study investigates how physical exercise affects handwriting performance, revealing that cognitive fatigue persists longer than mechanical recovery, highlighting the need for extended recovery periods in sports and professional activities.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new online handwritten database and analyzes the impact of physical exercise on handwriting, emphasizing the dissociation between mechanical and cognitive recovery.

Findings

Mechanical recovery occurs quickly post-exercise.

Cognitive fatigue persists longer than mechanical fatigue.

Handwriting performance shows statistical differences after exercise.

Abstract

Practical determination of physical recovery after intense exercise is a challenging topic that must include mechanical aspects as well as cognitive ones because most of physical sport activities, as well as professional activities (including brain computer interface-operated systems), require good shape in both of them. This paper presents a new online handwritten database of 20 healthy subjects. The main goal was to study the influence of several physical exercise stimuli in different handwritten tasks and to evaluate the recovery after strenuous exercise. To this aim, they performed different handwritten tasks before and after physical exercise as well as other measurements such as metabolic and mechanical fatigue assessment. Experimental results showed that although a fast mechanical recovery happens and can be measured by lactate concentrations and mechanical fatigue, this is not the case when cognitive effort is required. Handwriting analysis revealed that statistical differences exist on handwriting performance even after lactate concentration and mechanical assessment recovery. Conclusions: This points out a necessity of more recovering time in sport and professional activities than those measured in classic ways.