Even people with perfect vision and motor skills may have problems with hand-eye coordination.
That’s because the problem is generally not with the individual systems, but rather with how the brain, eyes, and body communicate.
Eye-Hand coordination is just one of the vision skills required for sports. Individuals with poor hand-eye coordination may find it difficult to play sports, hitting or catching a ball, have messy handwriting or even suffer with eye strain. Poor hand-eye coordination is caused by a difficulty in visual-motor coordination.
Fortunately, a vision therapy eye doctor can help assess your coordination and your sports vision skills, during a comprehensive eye exam, which just might what you need to take your game to the next level.
Schedule an eye exam with a vision therapy eye doctor near you who can evaluate your hand-eye coordination.
SEE RELATED: 5 Tips to Improve your Game
What is hand-eye coordination?
Hand-eye coordination is the ability to do activities that require the simultaneous use of our hands and eyes. For this to happen, our brain and eyes need to communicate smoothly.
Hand-eye coordination is greatly impacted by the functioning of our visual system.
Here’s how it works: The visual information we see around us is captured by our eyes and sent to the brain. The brain processes and interprets these images before informing our hands and arms of the object’s location, speed, size, and a variety of other characteristics.
This very complex process must run smoothly to allow our hands to respond quickly to visual stimuli. Having good hand-eye coordination can mean the difference between avoiding an accident by turning the steering wheel away from an approaching vehicle or being struck by that car.
We utilize hand-eye coordination multiple times a day when doing things like:
- Exercising or playing sports
- Driving
- Inserting a credit card into a chip reader
- Playing a video game
- Typing
- Writing
When the motor and visual systems don’t communicate efficiently, a person may experience symptoms like clumsiness. It can also cause professional, academic or developmental challenges. For example, poor hand-eye coordination can interfere with attention, handwriting and typing skills.
Vision therapy for hand-eye coordination
In children and adults, vision therapy for hand-eye coordination will help improve visual skills, which can take your sports game to the next level.
Vision therapy is an individualized treatment program designed to correct visual-motor deficiencies. It involves the use of specialized computer and optical devices, including prisms, filters and therapeutic lenses.
LEARN MORE: Guide to Sports Vision
Schedule an eye evaluation with a vision therapy eye doctor near you who can diagnose any vision problems you may have.
