Dr. Zilnicki created a brand new vision therapy exercise that is now available to all optometrists and vision therapist through the Bernell website
The product was designed to serve as an anti-suppression distance target to work on numerous systems for any age or type of patient you may have. As with all vision therapy exercises, the options are endless with some innovation on how to utilize them. Some of Dr. Zilnicki’s favorite activities are listed below:
- Anti-suppression Target for Distance Vergence Facility
A hallmark of Post-Concussion Vision Syndrome is reduced fusional ranges in the distance. Increasing these fusional ranges, while ensuring that binocularity is being maintained, is integral in the rehabilitative process and ultimately getting your patient more visually stable.
- Oculomotor Eye Movements with Visual Motor Integration
For our basic skills patients, these squares can serve as a building block for saccadic scanning or pursuits movements. You can begin this as a monocular exercise and build up to a binocular activity with anti-suppression as the patient’s skills improve.
- Long Brock String with ZAS Squares
This is one of my favorite exercises in the late phases of vision therapy because it challenges your patient to have true control over their fusional capabilities and gives them direct, consistent feedback on how they are doing.
- Near Far Accommodative Rock
To keep our younger patients engaged with accommodative activities, I like to do a lot of creative near/far work and ZAS squares serve as a perfect target.
- Field Loss – Exploratory Saccadic Therapy
Patients who have suffered a field loss are often found to develop hypometric saccades, resulting in inaccurate scanning and observation of their visual world. By improving the quality of a patient’s saccadic eye movements to the side of the loss, you can improve the patient’s mobility and activities of daily living.
This set up is unique to your patient, but ZAS squares can serve as moveable targets to encourage flexibility and dynamic scanning by your patient. As a reminder, work large saccades to small, more accurate saccades and then work on increasing speed of the search/scan.
