Measuring Vision Rehabilitation Outcomes on Visually Impaired Schoolchildren Using UKM-CHILD

Vision rehabilitation for visually impaired schoolchildren is very important to help them use their vision effectively in performing activities of daily living (ADL) and thus enable them to be more independent in the future. UKM-CHILD is an ADL index to assess the ability of visually impaired schoolchildren to perform ADL. UKM-CHILD consists of 25-items of self-reported questionnaire and 7-items of performance measures. The objective of this study was to measure vision rehabilitation outcomes on visually impaired schoolchildren using UKM-CHILD. Forty visually impaired schoolchildren aged 15.33 ± 1.56 years underwent vision rehabilitation which involved prescription of spectacles, low vision devices and training in the use of the low vision devices. The training sessions were conducted for 5 weeks and it includes training in the use of low vision devices and reading. The parameters of the study which are visual acuity, reading speed and performance of ADL (UKM-CHILD) were measured at pre and post rehabilitation. Results of this study showed that mean distance visual acuity improved by four lines (VA distance(pre): 0.85 ± 0.05 logMAR; VA distance(post): 0.40 ± 0.06 logMAR; z = -2.27, p = 0.026;) and mean near visual acuity improved by two lines after visual rehabilitation (VA near(pre): 0.64 ± 0.22 logMAR; VA near(post): 0.40 ± 0.12 logMAR; z = -5.21, p 0.05 ). Mean reading speed improved by 48% (reading speedpre: 49.58 ± 25.52 wpm; reading speed post: 73.22 ± 26.19 wpm; t(39) = 16.67, p 0.05). It was also found that the scores of self reported questionnaires (self-report pre: 1.72 ± 0.83 logit; self-report post: 2.12 ± 1.25 logit; z = -5.129, p 0.05) and performance measure (performance measure pre: 0.82 ± 0.30 logit; performance measure post: 2.87 ± 1.52 logit; z = -5.55, p 0.05) increased significantly after 5 weeks of rehabilitation. The finding of this study suggests that UKM-CHILD can be used to measure the outcome of vision rehabilitation.