ABSTRACT
A person's vision may drastically change throughout life due to several Internal and external factors, such as genetics or stress. This can lead to issues referred to as Visual Impairment, which describe an abnormal level of eyesight even with the use of eyeglasses, medication, surgery, or contact lenses. There is a wide range of visual impairment manifestations. In that regard, Visual Impairment may be caused by decreased or loss of visual acuity or a visual field. The melbourne ADL index developed by Haynes, Johnston, and Heyes (2001), is an assessment designed to measure the impact of vision related issues have on functional performance and is composed of 25 standardized items that are divided into two sections. The purpose of this was to evaluate the effect of visual disability on activities of daily living using the melbourne ADL index. A total of 36 subjects (n=36) Visually impaired subjects, using the data classification was of gender: male and female; (aged 10 to 80 years), occupation, educational background and level of vision were used in this study. The melbourne ADL index was carried out which comprised of two parts. Out of the 46 subjects that participated in this study, only 36 participants met the inclusion criteria that was needed for this study with a mean age of 28 ±14.44 years, majority of the participants were male (n=2; 58.33%), majority of the participants age were within the range of 21-30 years (n=15; 41.67%), majority of the participants were students (n=21; 58.33%), educational background was secondary level (n=20; 55.65%), ocular pathology from birth (n=9;25%), majority had a visual acuity of no light perception (n=11;30.56%), task score of (n=5;13.89%), importance score of 38 (n=5;13.89%), self care score of 30 and 34 (n= 5;13.89%). In task scores, a substantial number of participants had a score of 8 which suggested that this level of difficulty was common among the sample. An importance score of 38 was predominant among participants which signified that many activities were considered highly important. The self care scores were distributed across various values, with 30 and 34 being the most common scores, mean scores of the ADL scores were; ability: (35.86), importance: (36.97), self-care: (28.88). Descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, mean and standard deviation) was used to summarize the variables. In conclusion, the Chi-square tests conducted to explore the association between the gender and ADL scores yielded results indicating no statistically significant relationship between gender and these scores, ability score of (0.379), importance score of (0.389), self-care score of (0.606), which is greater than our p-value. In age, there was a statistically significant relationship only between age and the ability score (0.009), which is less than our p- value (< 0.005). While the importance scale had a score of (0.179), and the self-care a score of (0.137). Keywords: Visual Impairment, functional assessment, low Vision, activities of daily living.
