The ergonomic hardware I use to counter my RSI

In the article “How I cope with RSI” I promised to review my hardware. So here they are.

Logitech Marble Mouse

One of the most common non-standard mouse I know. It’s popularity is deserved to a certain degree, at least for me. The RSI-problem is mostly in my hand and I have the most trouble with clicking mouse buttons and holding my hand on a standard mouse.

Both these problems are solved with this trackball. Because of the positioning of the buttons I don’t rely on my overused index finger to click. Most of the time I use my thumb.

Since you can’t rest your hand on the Marble Mouse, you have to lift your whole hand. So I’m not resting my hand on the trackball that much. This position is slightly better than holding a normal mouse, but it’s still far from perfect. That’s why I use the trackball for with best hand, the left hand. The best thing about the trackball is it’s price, which is much more reasonable than most other “RSI-safe” devices.

It is a wired mouse by the way, as are all other devices I use. I hate to replace batteries.

E-Quill AirO2bic

One problem with a normal mouse is that I cannot rest my hand on the mouse. Because of that, there’s always a bit of tension in my hand. Even when I’m just holding the mouse for a short while. The AirO2bic mouse (stupid name for a mouse) is the perfect solution for that problem because I can really rest my hand in the mouse. My problem with mouse clicks on the other hand isn’t solved at all. I still have to press the button with my index finger.

A minor issue is the size of the mouse: normal mouse pads aren’t large enough. I had to buy a large gaming mouse pad in order to have enough space to move around.

Since the Quill in essence is just a normal mouse that’s tilted on its side, I never had problems with installing drivers. That’s worth something too. It’s something that I learned to value with my foot pedal.

Kinesis Savant Elite foot pedal

I earned a reputation with this gear. When people were baffled because I have 2 special mice and one regular mouse for visitors, I showed them the Savant Elite my foot pedal under my desk. You should see their faces

I bought the pedal because the Quill didn’t solve my problem with mouse clicks, which I still had to do with my index finger. Although the foot pedal helped, it wasn’t what I hoped for. Clicking with your foot is not as easy as it might appear. Double clicks were possible but felt very awkward since I discovered that a foot has less dexterity than a hand. I also had trouble to place my foot properly. You can’t rest your foot too hard on the pedal as you might accidentally do a mouse click. Keeping your foot a bit lifted on the other hand isn’t good either. In the end I used the pedal only for dragging actions.

The foot pedal also had some issues. It had 2 buttons that could be programmed to do all kinds of stuff and on at least 2 occasions that created problems. The pedal buttons would not work or weird events would be attached to it like “page down”. Resetting the hardware through special software solved that problem. After about 3 years it stopped working and a reset didn’t help either. Although I’m not totally happy with the product, I must say that the support was great.

Keyboard

Because I had a mouse on either side of my keyboard I was advised to buy a small keyboard. That way I didn’t have to stretch. I must say: If I wasn’t given that advise, I would never have bought such a keyboard myself since I would probably wouldn’t recognize it as an issue. But the reasoning seems sound, so I stuck with it.

Think of your own hardware: exercise

There are lots of solutions on the market to help you cope with RSI. And although a good workspace arrangement helps, exercise really helped me the best in getting back on track. So I have no illusions that my problems can be solved by hardware only.