Fibre-optic pen aids understanding of dyslexia

A fibre-optic pen developed at the University of Washington will help scientists to see inside the brains of children with learning disabilities while they read and write.

The tool has been established by the UW’s Centre on Human Development and Disability and a paper published on its development can be found in Open Access online journal Sensors.

“Scientists needed a tool that allows them to see in real time what a person is writing while the scanning is going on in the brain,” said Thomas Lewis, Director of the Centre’s Instrument Development Laboratory. “We knew that fibre optics were an appropriate tool. The question was, how can you use a fibre-optic device to track handwriting?”

The tool was created by Lewis and colleagues by hollowing out a ballpoint pen and inserting two optical fibres that connected to a light-tight box in an adjacent control room where the pen’s movement is recorded.

The researchers also designed a simple wooden square pad to hold a piece of paper printed with continuously varying colour gradients.

The custom pen and pad enabled the team to record handwriting during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess behaviour and brain functions simultaneously.

The relatively inexpensive device connects to a computer whose software records every aspect of the handwriting, from stroke order to speed, hesitations and lift-offs. If scientists can understand how these physical patterns correlated with a child’s brain patterns, they can begin to understand the neural connections involved.

The team tested the device on subjects that were 11 and 14 years olds with either dyslexia or dysgraphia, as well as a control group of children without learning disabilities. The participants looked at printed directions on a screen while there heads were inside the fMRI scanner.

The subjects were given four-minute blocks of reading and writing tasks. They were then asked to simply think about writing an essay.

“If you picture yourself writing a letter, there’s a part of the brain that lights up as if you’re writing the letter,” said Todd Richards, Professor of Radiology and Principal Investigator of the UW Integrated Brain Imaging Center. “When you imagine yourself writing, it’s almost as if you’re actually writing, minus the motion problems.”

Richards and colleagues are beginning to analyse the data collected from the participants of the study and have already found some interesting results.

“There are certain centres and neural pathways that we didn’t necessarily expert to be activated. There are language pathways that are very well known. Then there are other motor pathways that allow you to move your hands. But how it all connects to the hand and motion is still being understood.”

It is hoped that besides learning disorders, the pen and pad could also help researcher study motor control conditions in adults, such as Parkinson’s disease.