Ergonomics

Originally posted 2005-02-18 12:28:05

While shooting baskets with my son a few months ago, I noticed my wrist protesting every shot I threw up. Odd, I thought.I didn’t recall injuring my wrist. Since the stiffness in my wrist groaned loud enough to hear only when shooting a basketball, I promptly forgot about the injury.

A couple of months later, my son coaxed me out to the driveway to play some more hoops. My first shot reminded me about my cranky wrist. I immediately concluded that I don’t play basketball enough. Then, I puzzled over why an injury I couldn’t remember continued to linger in my wrist. You’ve probably figured out the cause by now, but I’m a bit thick so it took me a little longer to realize that since I work on computers all day, every day, I must be succumbing to some sort of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI).

A trip to CompUSA, Circuit City, and Best Buy taught me that most consumers don’t worry about RSI. The mice and keyboards I found came in all kinds of sizes and shapes, prim in basic black or racy with psychedelic colors. Flat keyboards sat beside mildly tented ones. Mice either sprouted wires or didn’t, with no apparent cost differential. Some mice looked like bars of soap, while others more like my daughter’s play-dough experiments. Some keyboards dazzled me with buttons for launching my browser, adjusting speaker volume, leaping to eBay, or skipping to the next song in my media player of choice, while others toed the corporate line of utilitarian blandness. No mouse or keyboard, however, differentiated itself from the rest as an effective solution to creeping RSI. Visions of 1950’s U.S. automobiles flashed before me: fins grew and shrank (well, mostly grew), and cosmetics changed from year to year, but the cars themselves differed little. I already had a whiz-bang Logitech cordless click-wheel mouse and Logitech swooping “ergonomic” keyboard with volume wheel, scroll wheel, and multimedia buttons. These two devices had inflicted the nagging wrist pain on me, and I saw nothing that promised any better treatment.

So, I hopped on the Web and began my search for ergonomic input devices. Unfortunately, Google spat back pages and pages of the same devices found on the shelves of CompUSA, Circuit City, and Best Buy. Winnowing the results to find something truly different took effort, but I finally found some things that piqued my interest.

One keyboard shouts for attention: the $339 TouchStream LP from FingerWorks (http://www.fingerworks.com). I used to work with a Linux geek who used one of these, and he loved it. His gyrating acrobatics could move the mouse, enter strings of text, and summon commands faster than I could find and tap my space bar. I considered this mouse/keyboard hybrid, even though its membrane keyboard reminded me of the Atari 400 I cut my teeth on in junior high, but decided that the twists, spins, and gainers my hands would perform would likely prove more damaging than a soap-bar mouse and rectangular slab keyboard. Besides, I wasn’t sure my wrist hurt $339.

I also looked at 3M’s Renaissance Mouse (http://www.3m.com/cws/renmouse.html), which immediately launched memories of those Atari joysticks. This mouse-and-keyboard quest proved quite nostalgic. I looked, and looked, and looked at it, and then passed: a little too weird.

I settled on Evoluent’s Vertical Mouse (http://www.evoluent.com/), which posits that a handshaking forearm-wrist-hand posture causes less stress than the usual 90 degree rotation position most mice require the forearm-wrist-hand to adopt. It also has five programmable buttons: One for left click, one for right click, one for double click, one at the thumb for “back” in the browser, and a clickable scroll wheel. I ordered it directly from Evoluent, and it arrived promptly in festive packaging. I’ve been using it about a week. The first couple of days that I used it, I noticed a dull ache in my forearm during the late afternoon. That ache has gone away, so I assume those muscles needed a little strengthening to be able to handle a vertical posture for so much of the day. The thumb button hasn’t made much impact yet–I was already accustomed to using gestures in Opera ad Firefox for going back, so that button hasn’t saved much time or effort. I may remap it eventually. The double click button, however, rocks. I now sneer at mice that make me press a button twice in rapid succession.

To address my sprawling keyboard, I zeroed in on TypeMatrix’s line of compact keyboards (http://www.typematrix.com). They have two: the EZ-Reach 2020 and the EZ-Reach 2030. I bought their claim that a narrower keyboard causes less reaching, both for keys and for the mouse. I do most of my work-away-from-work on laptops, so having fewer keys and a smaller keyboard footprint seems normal to me. The grid layout intrigued me as well. I don’t know if its perpendicularity really beats most keyboards’ staggered look, but it seemed plausible enough for me to swallow. I settled on the 2030 since it’s newer and the model number is higher and costs only a little more, ordered it, and it arrived last night.

My impressions after a day of use? I type nearly as fast on this keyboard as I did on my other, which speed was never stellar but passable. A few more days and I’m sure I’ll regain my original speed. I like the Enter and Back Space keys in the middle of the keyboard, which can be struck by my pointer fingers rather than by twisted pinkies, though sometimes I forget about them. The keys are full-size, feel firm, and have a good throw. The inverted-T arrows–a must–work as advertised. The keyboard has an interesting key marked “Shuffle” that substitutes for Alt-Tab: press and hold to cycle through applications. The rotation it effects seems too slow, however, and I don’t see any way to speed it up, so I’ll probably stick with Alt-Tab. The Alt key is a little farther left than my left thumb can comfortably reach without moving my entire left hand, though. I wish they’d swapped the Shift and Alt keys across the bottom. I’ll have to figure out how to remap them. I also think that I wish they’d made the left Shift key normal height, and the Tab key double height instead, but I’m not sure about that one. Maybe they know best.

My input device replacement spree set me back about $190, which is more than I’d hoped but still significantly less than $339. I gulped at purchasing tactile devices without touching them first, but return policies assuaged most of the trepidation. And how’s my wrist? I’ll tell you the next time I try to play basketball.