Coordination of arm movements in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder

Of all school-aged children 6% are diagnosed with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). These children have difficulties performing everyday fine and gross motor tasks at home and in school. Especially complex motor activities cause difficulties, for example coordinating the hand to catch a ball or performing goal-directed reaching movements. DCD is a condition that does not only affect motor behaviour, but it also has a large impact on social and psychological aspects of daily living. The broad bandwidth of problems related to DCD underlines the need of a thorough understanding of which motor control processes are deviant in this disorder. In the field of upper extremity movements, most research on DCD has been on outcome measures of motor tasks such as accuracy, thereby ignoring joint coordination bringing about that task performance.

The aim of this study is therefore to determine how joint coordination of children with DCD aged 5 to 11 years is affected compared to typically developing children when upper extremity movements are performed, i.e. reaching and interception movements.

Participants will be measured once.

no intervention is applied