Online Handwriting, Signature and Touch Dynamics: Tasks and Potential Applications in the Field of Security and Health

Advantageous property of behavioural signals (e.g. handwriting), in contrast to morphological ones (e.g. iris, fingerprint, hand geometry), is the possibility to ask a user to perform many different tasks. This article summarises recent findings and applications of different handwriting/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. 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.