A couple weeks ago I was hit with some wrist pain in my left (non-mouse) hand which I never had before in this way. By talking to a couple people and especially one colleague who experienced pretty bad pains in his shoulders and has gone the whole nine yards to cope with that got me to this: I have a pronation problem in both hands. Also using a mouse is perhaps not the best thing to do.
My current keyboard is a Filco Majestouch. That is quite a nice keyboard if one thinks inside the box. To get rid of the pronation I looked at other keyboards and realized that the ones like Typematrix, Truly Ergnonomic are not going to cover that. The Kinesis Advantage does not seem to do very much against pronation. The Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 (which I used to own) was rather nice; the key switches sucked pretty badly, though. I ended up ordering a Keyboard.io, but I try to be realistic about the shipping date :-/.
For the meantime I build this with cardboard and duct-tape:
https://i.imgur.com/WUbYiMT.jpg
Now I have horrible rubber dome switches on the “bad” hand, but at least less pronation. Switching the keyboards around would move the mouse away even farther, perhaps that is not good either.
I hope that the keyboard.io ships in say October and I will have to make do with the current setup until then.
Said colleage uses a Kensington SlimBlade trackball with an additional wrist cushion. Also he told me to not use the ThinkPad TrackPoint as he destroyed his shoulder with that. For now I have just set it to a very high sensitivity such that I do not need much force.
For the mouse I have a small Logitech Mouse:
This has served me quite well. One of my first mice was a Logitech G5. Only after switching to an Apple Mighty Mouse I realized that I am a “fingertip grip” and not a “palm grip” person. Since then I had a Razer Diamondback 3G and now this simple Logitech one.
Because I wanted to relieve my left hand a bit I started to do a few more things with the mouse. A similar strain has kicked in there and I thought that the mouse-hand needs some care as well. This Friday I started to use an ergonomic mouse by CSL:
One can clearly see that this helps against the pronation:
However, I am now experiencing strain (which could be simple muscle ache) in my lower arm which I feel not quite good about. From the images I gather that I now go into palm grip with that mouse. This forces me to move the mouse with my lower arm and wrist which is of course something I am not used to (and do not want to do because of my shoulder!). Perhaps this mouse is good for the pronation but bad for wrist, lower arm and shoulder?
By now I am a little overwhelmed with possible options to relieve this pain. My general physician told me that I should try to type less (obviously) and perhaps contact some workspace expert. I'll try to find somebody in my town to look at my problem in person. However, I fear that most physicians are rather non-geeky and do now know about the world of non-standard human input devices. So I would like to ask here where I am sure that you know a vast amount of funny devices
.My whole setup should be quite good regarding ergonomics:
- Chair has a good height, arm rests and sensible reclining mechanism
- Table is high and big enough
- Screen is high enough
- Screen brightness is automatically with ColorHugALS and DDC/CI
- Ambient lightings are taped to the back of the screens, no reflections on the desk.
I have a few main questions:
- Is my two-keyboard setup doing any good for my right wrist or will it make the problem even worse by having two kinds of switches?
- What type of pointer device does have an ergonomic advantage? Could you perhaps recommend a particular product?
