Kinematics of developmental coordination disorder : motor control of functional movement skills

Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) have problems with the performance of all sorts of activities that require motor coordination. These movement difficulties often interfere with the children's academic achievements and they also inhibit normal participation to activities of daily living. In order to better understand the movement difficulties of these children, the aim of this dissertation is to present an objective and quantitative in depth analysis of a range of basic movement skills of children with DCD. An introductory chapter (Chapter 1) attempts to provide an overview of the diagnosis, the prevalence, the outcome, the characteristics, and putative underlying mechanisms of DCD. After that, a detailed analysis of the control of a simple catching task gives insight into the basic interceptive capacities of children with DCD (Chapter 2). In a second study, the spatio- temporal control and the body kinematics of children with DCD during walking is investigated and compared to that of typically developing children (Chapter 3). The study described into Chapter 4 builds on the knowledge of the first gait-study and goes beyond that by looking to the contribution of visual information to the control of walking. The fourth and last study concentrates on the control of balance and the fundamental sensory integration capacities in children with DCD (Chapter 5). The results of these studies are discussed in the light of putative, underlying perceptual and motor control deficits of DCD in a final, general discussion (Chapter 6).

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