The effect of sports participation on depth perception in elderly

Abstract

Introduction and purpose: Number of elderly is increasing in the world and as they grow older the risk of falling increases, accordingly. Visual disturbances are among internal risky factors of falling and meanwhile depth perception attenuation as one king of visual disturbances has the highest relationship with their falling. The aim of present investigation was to the effect of sports participation on depth perception in elderly. Materials and Methods: In this quasi-experimental study, 34 participants including 18 activeelderly who were participating in sport and 16 inactive elderly were selected from Tabriz city, using random sampling method. Average age of sample size was (60.88±4.09). The subjects were evaluated 8 times with hot colors (red and orange) and cold colors (blue and green) using depth perception device with simultaneous validity of 0.833 and reliability 0.879. The average of these 8 times was used as individuals' depth perception score. Collected data were analyzed using independent t-test. Findings: There was a significant difference between error level of depth perception in active and inactive elderly (P less-than 0.05). Moreover active elderly indicated better performance in cold colors, but the difference was significant in hot colors. Conclusion: Generally it can be claimed that exercise plays an important role in most fields of daily life and to some degree in visual-perceptual performance, in a way that doing exercise has direct relationship with visual perception trait.