To Örebro University

Introduction: Today there is an increasing awareness of the need for validated instruments in upper limb prosthetics outcome assessments. One of the instruments suggested is the Southampton Hand Assessment Procedure (SHAP). In order for the clinicians to know how to interpret the results from the assessments, norms for different age groups are needed. Previously, normative data for SHAP has been reported for an English sample and work is underway from Slovenia. However, norms are only available for people up to 75 years of age, and no normative data is available for Sweden. Hence, the aim was to collect  data also from people age 75 and older, and from Sweden.

Methods: Participants and procedure — 58 persons (md age 52.5, range 20-92 years) participated in the study. Participants were recruited among students at Örebro University, staff at Örebro University Hospital, and people attending a community-based centre for senior citizens. Inclusion criteria were self-determined normal hand-function and no hand-impairment at time of testing. Data was collected according to the standardized procedure in the manual, and by one single "assessor" an OT-student. Instrumentation — The SHAPconsists of 26 tasks: 6 abstract objects in both lightweight and heavyweight form, and 14 simulated ADL-tasks. All tasks are representing one out of six grip-patterns. The subject is instructed to start and stop the timer before and after performing the task. An overall score, the Index of Functionality (IOF), is calculated based on the resulting times.

Results: Mean IOF was 96.7. One-way ANOVA with index of functionality as dependent variable showed a statistical significant difference in dominant hand function between age groups.