Digital Pen cognitive assessments go beyond traditional scoring by capturing how answers are produced: timing, pressure, stroke patterns, and pauses. These fine-grained metrics can help detect subtle cognitive changes earlier than standard scoring alone, improving sensitivity and diagnostic accuracy. However, open-source tools to extract them are limited and proprietary alternatives are prohibitively expensive for academic researchers.
The Digital Pen Feature Extraction Challenge will develop open-source methods to better contextualize pen-and-paper cognitive assessments. Launching Fall 2026, it focuses on Digital Clock Drawing Assessments (dCDT), a popular digital pen cognitive assessment, and evaluates algorithms on their ability to predict cognitive domains and risk factors.
