Soccer Rehabilitation: Enhancing Lives of Blind Individuals Globally

This essay explores the use of soccer as a rehabilitation method for blind individuals. It begins by highlighting the global prevalence of blindness and the need for rehabilitation, distinguishing between those blind from birth and those who lose sight later in life. The essay emphasizes soccer's role as a low-cost method that enhances sound senses and promotes social inclusion. It discusses technological advancements in tracking player and ball movement and the design of the ball to facilitate sound detection. The role of callers in guiding players and the creation of mental images through sound are also discussed. The essay concludes that soccer is a successful rehabilitation approach, alongside other physical methods.

Running head: SOCCER AS REHABILITATION FOR BLIND PEOPLE
Soccer as Rehabilitation for Blind People
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SOCCER AS REHABILITATION FOR BLIND PEOPLE 2
Introduction
The estimated number of blind people globally is 39 million, while those with a low
vision stand at 246 million. Over the past years, a large number of blind people have gone
through rehabilitation to regain their sight, and this majorly depends on different factors such as
the time of blindness at birth/congenital or development at the tender age. Such individuals
always tend to learn on various adaptations. However, individual who lose sight at older age
needs to learn new ways of doing things through rehabilitation.
Different types of blind rehabilitation have been used over the past years, such as gene
therapy, neuroprotective treatment, and physical approaches such as mobility training. Football
sports are perceived as one of the powerful low-cost blind rehabilitation methods since it
enhances the sound senses as well as social inclusion and cohesion of the disabled individuals
into the community (de Haan, Faul & Kohe, 2013). Over the past years, due to technological
advancement, there has been increasing number of products and techniques that have been used
in tracking and controlling the movement of both players and the ball on the pitch to evaluate the
performance of single and entire team both in the local and international view (Kimura, 2019).
On the same note, the technological devices enable the blind players to improve on their daily
tasks after having enough training on the ground.
Blind people’s ball is always designed in a way that enables the players to detect sounds,
thus locate both the ball and player, for example, shots equipped with sleigh bell to produce
sound. The sounds produced by the moving balls tend to create a sensory on the blind people,
thus through training, blind people tend to gain the capability to determine the direction, speed as
well as the distance between them and the ball to make an appropriate movement (Li,
2014). Additionally, during the training and football play, athletes are always faced with the

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challenge of locating the goalkeeper, thus always depend on the sounds produced by the callers
who are still assistant and not visually impaired. Callers are responsible for hitting the four
corners of the goal. The composed music enables the blind players to interpret the dimensions of
the goals and then position themselves concerning the purpose (Kober et al., 2014). Through the
transformation and interpretation of the sounds into a mental image, the blind players can
coordinate and run across the pitch without bumping into one another.
Therefore, for the individual who has lost their sight during the old age and need to
relearn new things, have the opportunity rehabilitate themselves through soccer training, during
which creation of the mental image through hearing is critical. On the same note, people that are
born blind, have the opportunity to be trained through the use of sensory substitution devices to
enable them to visualize movements of objects such as football in the pitch.
Conclusion
Through football training, thus a large number of a blind and visually impaired individual
across the world has the opportunity to coordinate their activities without much difficulty.
Therefore, football, along with other physical approaches, has proven to be one of the successful
methods.

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References
de Haan,D.,Faul, A., & Kohe, G. (2013). Celebrating the social in soccer: spectators’ experience
of the forgotten (Blind) Football World Cup. Soccer & Society, 15(4), 578-595. Retrieved
from https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2013.828596
Kimura,A. (2019). Study of Pratical Energizing Alert For Blind Persons to Know The Approach
of People. Archives Of Physical Medicine And Rehabilitation, 100(10). Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmr.2019.08.373
Kober, S., Wood, G., Kampl, C., Neuper, C., & Ischebeck, A.(2014). Electrophysiological
correlates of mental navigation in blind and sighted people. Behavioral Brain Research,
273,106-115. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2014.07.002
Li, Y. (2014). Optimal multisensor integrated navigation through information space approach.
Physical Communication, 13, 44-53.Retrived from https:// doi.org.
10.1016/j.phycom.2013.11.011