Write Together: Using Haptic Coupling to Enhance Children's Handwriting

The acquisition of handwriting is a challenging task for children, requiring consistent exercise throughout primary school. Many children struggle to develop fluent handwriting, which in turn may impact their academic success and affect their self-esteem. The emergence of new technologies supporting handwriting exercise and allowing active interactions with educators, caregivers, and/or peers has led researchers to explore the potential use of these new tools. Studies show that haptic technology and exploiting experts' trajectory feedback may improve students' performance better than one-way instruction. In the present study, we explore the use of bidirectional haptic feedback to support handwriting exercises. Twelve child and caregiver dyads were asked to copy single letters or letter pairs in cursive handwriting while being physically coupled or not. Results show improvement for the less skilled participant in the dyad, especially in handwriting fluency, when physically coupled.