A novel hand throwing test to determine hand dexterity and hand-eye coordination in older adults

Abstract Objectives This study developed a novel hand-throwing test to assess hand-eye coordination in healthy older adults. Methods Twenty-nine right-handed older adults (14 males, 72.5±5 years; 15 females, 70.5±3.8 years) completed two visits within 1 week. Each visit comprised two tests. In each test, participants threw 20 plastic balls with the dominant hand (DH) and another 20 plastic balls with the non-dominant hand (NDH) with the order of hand use randomized across tests. The balls measured 7 cm in diameter and weighed 8.5 g. Each test consisted of five balls in red, yellow, blue, and green, drawn in randomized order and thrown toward color-matched target buckets. Measures included total throwing time, throwing accuracy, and throw completion time. Results Reliability was assessed using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC 3,1 ). Reliability was excellent for total throwing time (ICC=0.78–0.85) and good to excellent for time to complete throwing (ICC=0.69–0.84), but lower for throwing accuracy (ICC=0.38–0.73). Longer throwing times were observed on Day 2 and NDH performance was consistently slower than DH (p<0.05). Accuracy was significantly better with DH, with red balls yielding superior accuracy (p<0.05). Throw completion time was faster with DH in Test 2, with red balls producing the shortest times and green balls the longest. Conclusions The hand-throwing test demonstrated good to excellent reliability for timing measures but lower reliability for accuracy. Findings highlight the influence of motor dominance and stimulus color on perceptual coordination in older adults.