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Background: Kinesiologists, Physical Anthropologists, and Anatomists have all long been captivated by the structure and development of the superficial forearm flexor, the Palmaris longus. Objective: To study the effect of Palmaris Longus on certain handwriting skills. Subjects and Methods: Three Palmaris Longus occurrence tests were conducted on 200 students (100 males and 100 females) affiliated to Colleges of Medicine of Baghdad University then the participants were tested for certain handwriting skills to correlate the presence of Palmaris Longus in the dominant side with handwriting. Results: 89% of all subjects (178 subjects) and 91% of males were right-handed. Dominant Palmaris Longus among males (61%) was significantly higher than that of females (30%). Regarding the Motor assessment scale; female participants achieved good and it was significantly higher than that of males (23%). There was a significant association between left Palmaris Longus only and acceptable horizontal line assessment. Good sentence composition was noticed significantly in dominant Palmaris Longus. Conclusions: Variation of presence of Palmaris Longus in both sexes in the studied group meets with normal recorded variation. Presence of Palmaris Longus in the dominant forearm has correlation with good certain skills of handwriting skills.

Handwriting plays a dominant role as a mode of communication, for children handwriting legibility and speed is naturally acquired, but few children acquire the skill through practice in primary schools. Academic success demands a good handwriting skill. Developmental coordination disorder is marked by the hallmark characteristics of clumsiness and difficulty in executing the activities of daily living skill. The current study aims in the evaluation of visual-motor integration skill on handwriting performance in children with developmental coordination disorder. Minnesota Handwriting Test (MHT) and the Berry test of Visual-Motor Integration (VMI) were used to determine the child's progression. 50 DCD children of age 5-10 years were included in the study and randomly divided into two groups were the group A received 6 weeks of visual motor integration training and the children at group B receives regular academic instructions from their teachers. Group A children received training sessions weekly two times and each sessions last for about 30 minutes. Childs handwriting accuracy and speed were analyzed by MHT and the beery test of VMI measures the child visual motor integration skill. Data interpretation and analysis was done by the secondary researchers and they were not aware of the group segregation. The results of the study confirms there is a significant improvement in group A children and the study suggests that visual motor integration training is the prerequisite for handwriting skill acquisition for children with DCD. Without a gold standard assessment tool to diagnose the children confidently as DCD, we have used DCDQ, DSM-V Criteria for the screening procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Pakistan, the biggest challenge is to provide high quality education to the individuals with learning disabilities. Besides the well known affordance issue, there is a lack of awareness regarding the term dyslexia and remedial teaching training that causes the identification as well as remediation of the dyslexic individuals at early stages in Pakistan. The research was focused to exploit the benefits of using the modern mobile technology features in providing a learning platform for young dyslexic writers. Based on potential usability requirements of young dyslexic writers stated by remedial teachers of dyslexics, an android based application is designed and implemented using the usability engineering process model to encourage the learning process and help dyslexic children improve their fundamental handwriting skill. In addition, a handwriting learning algorithm based on concepts of machine learning is designed and implemented to decide the learning content, evaluate the learning performance, display the performance results and record the learning growth to show the strengths and weaknesses of a dyslexic child. The research was also aimed to assess the usability of the learner-centered application by the targeted population by conducting a user acceptance test to evaluate their learning experience and benefits of the developed application to dyslexic users. The results of the evaluation provided by the participants revealed that application has potential benefits to foster the learning process and help children with dyslexia by improving their foundational writing skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]