Handwriting and Drawing Features for Detecting Negative Moods

In order to provide support to the implementation of on-line and remote systems for the early detection of interactional disorders, this paper reports on the exploitation of handwriting and drawing features for detecting negative moods. The features are collected from depressed, stressed, and anxious subjects, assessed with DASS-42, and matched by age and gender with handwriting and drawing features of typically ones. Mixed ANOVA analyses, based on a binary categorization of the groups, reveal significant differences among features collected from subjects with negative moods with respect to the control group depending on the involved exercises and features categories (in time or frequency of the considered events). In addition, the paper reports the description of a large database of handwriting and drawing features collected from 240 subjects.