Human figure drawings are widely used in clinical practice as a qualitative indication of Body Representations (BRs) alterations in stroke patients. The objective of this study is to present and validate the use of a new app called QDraw for the quantitative analysis of drawings and to investigate whether this analysis can reveal distortions of BRs in chronic stroke patients.
QDraw has proven to generate reliable data as compared to manual scoring and in terms of inter-rater reliability, as shown by the high correlation coefficients. Moreover, human figure drawings from chronic stroke patients demonstrated a distortion of upper limb perception, as shown by a significantly higher arm length asymmetry compared to legs, whereas no difference was found in healthy controls.
The present study supports the use of quantitative, digital methods (the QDraw app) to analyze human figure drawings as a tool to evaluate BRs distortions in stroke patients.