Occupational Therapy Exercises for Hand & Eye Coordination

Occupational therapy (OT) is task-orientated therapy designed to improve a patient's physical abilities and quality of life. Occupational therapy is often prescribed for people who have suffered brain or spinal injury. A brain injury can lead to poor hand-eye coordination. Although OT exercises can be done to improve hand-eye coordination, it involves time and patience.

Developing a Plan

• An occupational therapist should work with patients to develop exercises that will improve hand-eye coordination, while at the same time providing the patient with a fun activity to do. An effective way for a therapist to do this is to find out the interests of the patient and use those interests as the core for exercising.

  For example, if a patient in occupational therapy enjoys playing ping-pong but an eye injury has worsened the person's hand-eye coordination. During OT sessions, the therapist and patient could play games of ping-pong. To make hitting the ball easier, the patient could use an abnormally big paddle. As the patient's hand-eye coordination improves, he could switch back to a standard paddle.

  For exercises for the patient to do on his own time, the therapist could give the patient a ping-pong video game. Video games can be very beneficial in improving hand-eye coordination.

  All occupational therapy exercise regimens with the goal of improving hand-eye coordination follow the same pattern: make the given activity easy, and as the person shows improvement with hand-eye coordination, make the activity more challenging. Repetition is essential for this plan to work. The more the patient works on the activity, the more improvement will be seen.

OT Availability

• Occupational therapy is available through a doctor's prescription and is administered at a variety of places like hospitals, elementary and secondary schools, and rehabilitation centers.