Ergonomic mice

[time]

I would really appreciate people sharing any practical experience in dealing with hand/wrist tendonitis issues, i.e. RSI. My daughter is the sufferer. Mouse usage seems to be the trigger. She switched to her left hand and has now hurt that arm as well.

For someone who's attached to one computer or another most of her waking hours, it's a soul-destroying affliction.

Her work is talking about either a cylindrical roller embedded in a keyboard or a touchpad. I remembered that Mercutio advocated the Logitech Trackman Wheel, which is a thumb trackball - it's also exclusively right-handed.

Anyone else care to share their experience or observations?

 

[MaxBurn]

I had a trackman and a marble fx that actually seemed to cause me quite a bit of pain, i wound up switching back to a regular mouse even though i rather liked the track balls.

I would suggest that while not actively using the mouse like reading a page or something to do some hand exercises. Hell even getting up and moving around every fifteen minutes is going to help a lot. We arent designed to just sit for hours.

 

[CougTek]

My brother also suffers from RSI and his solution is to use a Trackman Marble. If you can't, I suggest trying a Waco tablet as a pointing device. It's not cheap, but it's an alternative.

 

[Mercutio]

I got my father to switch to a Trackman when his wrists became bad. In the end, he did have to seek a surgical solution, but he did find the Trackman much more comfortable than the mouse he had been using previously and he still uses one.

 

[ddrueding]

I switch hand regularly, and don't keep my hand on the mouse when I'm not moving the cursor. Keyboard shortcuts help a lot here as well.

 

[Santilli]

I have big hands, so I buy big mouses. I also use a wrist rest maybe 3/4" thick, and that seems to really help.

I'm currently using a Gigabyte GM 8000, with all the weight in it, and a Razor Deathadder.
Both are large, pretty much as big as I could find.

I find the wrist starts being bothered when I don't have the pad in place. Using the rest seems to solve the problem.

Same thing with keyboards. If the wrists are pretty much flat, I'm fine. Reminds me of piano class, where they teach you to have your wrists up in the air, not resting on the piano.

If I don't get relief with the one wrist rest, I stack another on top, giving me two inches under my wrist, keeping it up in the air.

 

[CougTek]

I remember the picture of your playmate girlfriend and I kinda deducted that you had big hands...

 

[Santilli]

My fondest memory, that I can put in print, are walking into a local gym in Santa Cruz in the early 80's, with my trainer/sifu/boss Charles Halliday, and Mike Dixon, at the time, the number one heavyweight Olympic boxer in the world. We walked down a narrow hall way, to get to the weight room, turned a corner, and saw Diane Lee Hsu was in a skin tight, see through leotard, riding a stationary bicycle. All three of us, at the same time sucked all the air out of the room, just stunned at how beautiful she was, and how incredible she looked on that bike.
The incredibly beautiful face, HUGE(you REALLY have to be there to appreciate the size, and proportions) breasts, tiny waist, and perfect everything else was just
unbelievable.

At the time, Diane was a hugely underpaid modern dancer/Tom boy, that worked out 8 hours a day, at least, and then went over to San Jose to do professional modern dance.

She had developed certain muscles through dance that no other woman I've ever been with had.

I'll leave THAT to your imagination...

 

[mubs]

Not counting the OT posts, all good suggestions. I find I seldom have problems with mousing in and of itself. In my experience, what is critical is the positioning:

a) Height of the mouse work surface with respect to the seating height; does the arm / hand have to drop down, or is the shoulder raised. I am exaggerating the effect here, but minor changes in positioning has major effects over time

b) Is the arm straight, splayed outward, to what degree?

c) Is the wrist straight or held at an angle:
1) left to right
2) up or down from level

Paying attention to these will certainly help.

 

[Santilli]

For what it's worth:
Hitting a bag dictates the wrist is flattened. In other words, to avoid harm to the wrist etc.
the top of the hand has to be flat. We used to tape a ruler on the wrist, and align the rest of the hand with the wrist. This is an excellent guideline to protect your wrists, etc.

Think piano player/boxer flat line from forearm to hand, and you minimize damage.

Cougtek started the off post, I just helped a little;-)

For what it's worth: Diane Hsu, in person, was about 200 times more memorable then pictures...Truly incredible...Wish she would have said yes...

 

[Santilli]

If Angelina Jolie, and Diane Hsu were on bikes, in similar out fits, NO ONE would look at AJ>...

 

[time]

Please keep both hands on the keyboard when posting.

 

[time]

Spent half an hour playing with a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch. The Touch-only variant is discontinued and very heavily discounted, but we reluctantly concluded it wasn't even worth the $25 asking price. Possibly not as bad as the cheapest touchpads that you tend to find on netbooks, but otherwise truly awful.

Interestingly, although the Apple Macbook touchpads were significantly better, they were sluggish and nowhere near as good as those on some other laptops, notably a Lenovo X201. I read that Lenovo uses "negative inertia" processing to improve responsiveness; if that's what we were seeing, it really works.

Couldn't find either Cirque/Adesso EasyCat/BrowseCat GlidePoint touchpads in stock at any bricks and mortar stores, and the pricing online here is more than double that in the US.

Also couldn't find any Kensington trackballs - or really, Kensington anything, which is perplexing. It's also annoying because their trackball designs seem more practical (and expensive) than Logitech's.

Ended up with a Logitech Trackman Marble. The secret is to use two hands rather than try to cover the monster with one. It's also highly configurable, so you can change the orientation to sideways or upside-down, which all helps with the variety you need when you're trying to deal with RSI.

My daughter already has a height adjustable desk at work, but the chair's not so good and the keyboard and mouse are basic Dell, i.e. $5 crap. They've promised better alternatives, but that will probably take a month or so (staff are forbidden to connect anything to the computers).

Her home chair is much better quality but the desk is too high. We're looking at the possibility of an under-desk keyboard/mouse shelf - at the moment she has her feet on a platform to compensate. Mouse and keyboard are vastly superior, but she's in a pretty bad way and can't really use them; just pushing a key on the keyboard hurts.

 

[Howell]

Not counting the OT posts, all good suggestions. I find I seldom have problems with mousing in and of itself. In my experience, what is critical is the positioning:

a) Height of the mouse work surface with respect to the seating height; does the arm / hand have to drop down, or is the shoulder raised. I am exaggerating the effect here, but minor changes in positioning has major effects over time

b) Is the arm straight, splayed outward, to what degree?

c) Is the wrist straight or held at an angle:
1) left to right
2) up or down from level

Paying attention to these will certainly help.

Neither I nor does anyone I know have RSI problems but I can confirm that the only time I have had numbness in my wrists is when the desk was too low relative to my shoulders. It causes me to have to cock the hand up and lean forward onto my wrist. Rarely are desks tall enough so I generally have to slouch down in the chair rather than screw up my wrists. hth.

 

[Mercutio]

If I remember, I'll try to host a safe for work clip of Diana Lee from her Video Playmate profile, just for Santilli's benefit. She was and probably still is, knowing how Asian people usually age, a fantastically beautiful woman.

 

[Santilli]

Thanks Merc. Last time I talked to her she was in LA, working as a sports medicine therapist.

She fell in love with a playboy photographer. She married him, and went to the Caribbean
for a shoot. When she came home, somewhere in the midwest, the guy had changed the locks, and moved all her stuff out, to make room for his next Playboy bunny.

Apparently the guy would marry the girls when they were making the 100 grand, or more, that a bunny makes from the shoot, and then the being hot stuff, like being in James Bond movies, etc. that ends quickly, most of the time, after the first year or two.

He lived with them in a community property state, so, he would get half their income,
and then give them the boot when they cooled off.

Diane did the dancing in the start of James Bond License to Kill, and played Loti in the movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097742/fullcredits#cast
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0496729/

Sorry for the off topic post.

By the way, I had one of those giant track balls back in the mac days, and really didn't like it.

 

[Handruin]

Please keep both hands on the keyboard when posting.

Do we need to start a thread for putting keyboards in the dishwasher or how to repair the worn paint on a space bar?

 

[Santilli]

Does bring up a question. What keyboards for home use are spill proof, waterproof, food proof?

 

[Handruin]

Does bring up a question. What keyboards for home use are spill proof, waterproof, food proof?

Open a new thread for it so that we don't completely derail this thread.

 

[Bozo]

I made my own "desk" for home computer use. It is "L" shaped. The bottom of the "L" is flipped over (it would be a backwards "L" if you looked down on it. "_|" ) The short section is for my forearm to rest on with the mouse being on the main section. This keeps my wrist straight and is extremely comfortable.
Maybe this would help?

 

[time]

Thanks Bozo, that's the same conclusion I had come to, so it's great to have someone else confirming their actual experience.

I have my own arm strain problems. My desk has a corner cutout with a lowered tray for the keyboard. I have to use the mouse away from that and off to one side, which hyper-extends my wrist and hand. Apart from pain extending to the shoulder, I seem to have permanent weakness in that arm now. The difference is that I can easily switch to left-handed mousing for relief.

Last night, I unscrewed the tray, leaving a foot-deep cutout into the corner of the desk. I'm now sitting in that cutout, with my left and right arms free to rest on the sides of the cutout (when I'm not using the keyboard). I believe this gives my mouse arm the same support that you have achieved with your desk; it certainly feels a hell of a lot better.