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Keyboarding Love Or Keyboarding Pain
flyingember writes "Over on Ars, they've done the ultimate review for anyone who sits at a computer more than someone on AOL does, the IMAK Smart Gloves. These gloves are supposed to both prevent and help ease pain associated with conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Read it to see if our code monkey enjoys the gloves or if they're just something for him to throw at the gawking crowd."
Glasses? Check.
Dorky parted hair? Check.
High-pitched, nasally voice? Check.
Skinny fragile body? Check.
Computer gloves? Check.
Sigh.
So much for useful innovation...
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I had a moderate case of tendonitis from keyboarding and mousing about 2 years ago, and this thing does work.
I like the fact that you can still bend your wrist as much as you want, but you are gently reminded that you are bending, so you eventually stop doing it. It's not constricting like those braces.
switching to dvorak would probably help more than theses gloves...
I admit it. I'm a big perv. But when I read "keyboarding love," I thought it was a new euphemism for cybersex.
Man, that is flagrant false advertising.
I write in my journal
Was I the only one who thought this was going to be something cool and geeky since its on Slashdot? I was hoping it would be something like the P5 glove, except it would allow you to type in mid-air. I did read an article on something like that one time, but the last I heard it was just a prototype.
to masturbate while wearing that. isn't that why we're all in front of the computer? :P
Also try switching to Dvorak.
You probably won't be any faster, but your fingers *will* travel less. I know I used to have pain in my hands after long coding sessions at work on Querty - after switching to Dvorak I can say I have regained my previous speed (after three months or so) and long coding sessions no longer produce painful fingers!
Of course, you should see your doctor immediately upon RSI-type pain.
Thanks,
--
Matt
Pick up a pair of wrist braces at the local drug store. Much cheaper, and they do the same thing.
Obligatory UserFriendly comic.
...but if your computer is causing you pain, I speak the truth:
- check your insulin levels (no, it's not about diabetes)
- learn how to relax (body asleep/mind awake)
- get some exercise
It's taken me three years to put this puzzle together, and that first point is probably the most important (I learned it last week, and cutting out the carbohydrates has already started to make a difference). email me if you need more guidance, i'll be happy to dish out some knowledge..links:
on the subject of insulin - invert the frickin food pyramid
why relaxin' is important - and some suggestions for getting started
the exercise one - well, that one's kinda obvious, but is worthless without the other two.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I had some minor problems with wrists and my thumb that were really annoying. I used microsoft ergo keyboards, but they're not popular anymore and I needed a replacement. I got a good quality normal one. I've used the really nice IBM monsters in the past, still have one in fact.. but my girlfriend can hear it across the house, so that's not a long term option. *click click click*
The solution for me was when I started lifting weights.. the problems just went away. Get some free weights and a curl bar, cut back on the typing for a little while and then give it 6 months of 20 minutes three times a week. You'll look better, be stronger, and I bet your RSI will be better, too.
And stop typing when it hurts!
..don't panic
My ex-boss (who had CTS surgery) noticed I was having serious pain one day and suggested I change my posture. This involved several things:
1) Elevating my arms above my keyboard
Having my arms below my keyboard resulted in my wrists resting on the desk or keyboard and puting more pressure on the tendan (sp?). This can simply be done by raising your chair or lowering your keyboard.
2) Elevating my monitor above my keyboard. Having both the monitor and they keyboard on the same level resulted in my head being pointed down and my arms raised up. In general this is bad.
3) Having my legs at a 90 degree angle. That is your chair should be at the correct height so that your legs come straight down at a 90 degree angle.
4) Not slouching back. This is soooooo bad for your back. If you have a chair that allows you to lean back, make sure to stick it up right and in place. Slouching will result in lower back pain..
In general sitting at a computer all day writing code is bad for your health. Poor circulation and repetitive motion is not good. Take some time to make sure your workstation is setup ergonomically and it will improve whatever work related pain is ailing you. In aidditon splits do help, at least they helped me. I have to say though, just setting my workstation up right did more help than any doctor or splint.
1. Over in Ars Technica's forum someone named Figa made an excellent point:
Figa (quoted above) then proceeded to explain why other people's advice was bad and then gave a 15 point treatment plan :)
That said, if you're going to self-medicate with gadgetry, my vote would be to check out Kinesis's Contoured Keyboards
The keys are arranged in lines in pits in the shell of the key board. Your fingers naturally droop into the pits and then move forward and backward (rarely to the sides) to depress the appropriate key.
Claimed to make the activity of typing simulate CTS reducing exercises. I have a co-worker who has one and loves it.
My solution to wrist pain has been to use a break reminder program like xwrits to remind me to take a 5 minute break for every hour of computer use. I would use those five minutes to get out of my chair and walk around for a while, so not only was I resting my hands, but my whole body as well.
It's also a good idea to look out the window at something distant while taking your breaks, you can avoid eye strain by not focusing on something 18 inches from your head all the time.
JWZ has some good advice about this stuff on his site which I found very useful.
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
At the risk of being too serious for this crowd - three things cause hand pain commonly (mis-)diagnosed as carpal tunnel 1) neck problems - very specific diagnosis, but think of it as a pinched nerve 2) shoulder problems - "thoracic outlet syndrome" now more often called "neurovascular compression syndrome" primarily due to holding arm up and/or out, as in mousing - specifically spasm of the subscapularis muscle - push your fingers up under your shoulder blade at your armpit - it will elicit the same pain 3) forearm muscle problems - primarily due to prolonged forearm twisting (screwdriving, etc.) and sometimes sports. These things seem to be carpal tunnel to diagnosticians (read most MD's). They need professional treatment and/or work position changes or they will get worse. If you have true carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), the gloves in question will ease the pain at the expense of healing, since the typical nighttime hand pain in CTS is due to blood flow and the healing process. For CTS, weights or rubber bands used to strengthen the extensor muscles (back of the hands and arms) will fix many cases of true CTS. Don't let CTS go untreated as it can become permanent if it remains uncorrected. #1 priority in all cases should be workplace changes to prevent damage.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
I was having problems with numbness and a little pain in one wrist. I switched to MS Natural Keyboard at home and work and I don't have the problem any longer. I think it's because the Natural keyboard keeps my wrists straight whereas before they would be canted to the left and right (using a "normal" keyboard").
I got it from the doctor because of carpal tunnel like problems. (Insurance paid for a paid, even.) It has two velcro straps (which are tied to the glove kind of like shoelaces) which hold it on the arm. When I wear the glove, zero pain or problem whatsoever.
If I wear the glove for a few months time, all my problems disappear. But they'll eventually come back if I stop wearing them. So, now adays, I wear it as a preventative measure, and it really works great.
HINT: You might want to wash it on a regular basis, and you might want to have a backup pair for while it is being washed. Or two to switch between on a regular basis.
How is it?
Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?
Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...
xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.
Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)
I often type for over 12 hours a day--not 12 hour workdays, but 12 hours of actually banging at the keyboard. I used to get really bad cramps in my forearms and shoulders that would totally incapacitate me for a day or two at a time. Because I'm too poor to afford any high-tech gadgets (split keyboards and such), I had to come up with a cheap solution.
What I did was to put a four books on the table and use one of those "natural" keyboards that have the keys at an angle. The four books are positioned in a way that the top two hang over the base of the keyboard, and nearly butt right up against the space bar. The books are angled so the base of my palms sits on the corners, and my wrists end up being perfectly level and aligned with my forearms. Also, the books are fairly thick, so my fingers kind of "hang down" onto the keys. These are large (long and wide) hardbacks, large enough so my elbows are also resting on them, and the net result is to take all of the strain off of my forearms and shoulders.
Since my shoulders no longer have to do any work to hold my arms in place, and my forearms no longer have to do any work to maneuver my wrists, all of the pain has disappeared. I've done several consecutive 16-hour days of coding without feeling much of anything at all, and have never even felt close to the point where I'm too sore to type.
I actually suspect that a lot of the so-called "RSI" is not so much due to repition as it is due to the stress of holding ones arms and wrists in a certain position for hours at a time. If you've ever tried to hold a couple of heavy books with your arms perfectly straight for any length of time you'll know that the pain eventually becomes fiery and unbearable, and is quite similar to the pain you feel after several days of coding. By simply supporting your forearms and wrists with something other than your muscles, you do away with all of the strain, and in my case this was all that was needed.
The problem comes into play when playing some games - most Quake derivatives (Half-Life, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, etc.) use hard-coded Querty key layouts, so your keys revert back to Querty. Just something to keep in mind.
,AEO automatically. Some games like Jedi Knight go the opposite route, and read QWERTY in the menu and during gameplay. Not as good, but at least I can press a key during configuration and have the same key perform that function during gameplay.
This is why I switched to linux/wine for quake and quake derivatives (mostly Half-Life for me). Well, that and that I like to be able to individually tweak per-game opengl settings like FSAA in startup scripts. Anyway, keypresses in X are always translated before they get to the program, so I don't have to worry about using qwerty on my own machine.
It's not all that hard to switch back and forth, but there's a huge amount of inconsistency in windows. Most 3D games come with their keybindings preset for the popular WADS layout (w for forward, a for strafe left, d for strafe right, s for back, e for use, r for reload, etc...). Nicer, more modern games like Hitman II (the demo at least) automatically set themselves for your keyboard layout. I was incredibly pleased when I installed the game, got ready to reconfigure the key bindings, entered the menu, and found that the game had replaced WADS with
Wine fixes all of those problems, but what I really appreciate is what it does for Half-Life. In windows 2000 with the keyboard mapping set for dvorak, Half-Life reads dvorak in the menus and qwerty during gameplay. ARG! That means than I have to configure the game by entering a qwerty layout using a dvorak keyboard, and then play as if my keyboard weren't remapped. I tried HL under wine, saw that games worked like they should, and never went back.
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As for the parent post's question about how easy it is to switch, I didn't get really comfortable with dvorak until I had been using it for about two months. Now that I'm comfortable with it, I find that I type significantly faster than I did with qwerty; I'm probably about 10-20% faster, but I've never done a benchmark or anything (before or after). The most significant benefit, I think, is that I got to re-learn how to type and get rid of some bad habbits I could never shake. Before I switched, I would hit shift with the same hand I used to type the capital letter; now I hit shift with one hand and hit the letter key with the other.
As for how hard it is to switch back and forth between qwerty and dvorak, I have some direct experience with that. I use dvorak on my home computer and on a friend's computer (he switched about the same time I did), but I'm forced to use qwerty on the computers at my college. I spend much more time typing at home than I do at school, so using qwerty is fairly awkward for the first few minutes. After that I probably type at about 80-90% the speed I did before (again, that's just a guess).
Since this has just turned into an RSI discussion, I thought I'd add another overlooked point. In my own personal experience, I feel more pain from using a mouse than a flat keyboard. Resting your wrist on the mousepad with your hand bent up and forward, over the mouse, is very bad. I think its the act of having your wrist bent awkwardly while using your fingers that leads to RSI. Gel mouse and keyboard rests shouldn't be used *while* typing/using the mouse, only to rest when you *aren't* doing that. I switched to a trackball from a mouse and I always try to keep my wrist straight (not bent) when using it, and its made a big difference (in addition to my kinesis keyboard). Figure I'd mention this, as the mouse often gets overlooked.
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
Once my speed had picked up to the point where I could actually get something done, my old habit of letting my wrist bend came back to haunt me. If the gloves look nerdy, imagine a man with sharp pencils strapped to the top of his arms with velcro for an even nerdier image. The pencil points would poke me every time my wrists bent which would remind me to straighten my wrists. That was what this geek needed to get rid of the problem. I've since discarded the pencils and instead, stacked two keyboard wrist rests on top of each other so I don't have to think about wrist posture - it comes automatically. YMMV.
For what it's worth, I never did regain my qwerty speed. I type at 70 wpm now but back in the days when cpu speed was measured in khz I'd hit bursts of 95 wpm. The other down side is it annoys the hell out of people I work with because nobody ever knows what the current state of the keyboard is until they start typing and discover they're typing gibberish.
Switching to dvorak is an improvement over qwerty, but it's a very minor improvement compared to using correct typing posture. You'll get RSI typing in dvorak just the same as qwerty if you have your wrists bent while typing, though it might take longer. I type dvorak and have for a good four years, but I still see a pair of these gloves in my future.
The enemies of Democracy are
At my previous job, my (right) mousing arm was in a very bad position for mousing, and I started getting a significant amount of pain in my wrist. (Would have been less than $100 for a proper mouse tray so I can use a computer for the remainder of my life, cheap bastards)
When I switched jobs, I started using the Imak SmartGlove and my wrist DOES NOT HURT AT ALL ANYMORE. If I type/mouse without one for a few hours, I feel the pain coming back.
The only drawback is wear. If this thing in on my wrist basically all day, it gets dirty. After a few weeks or months (depending on your particular body chemistry), it will start to get a bit rank, and will need to be washed. Just take out the support and throw it in with the laundry.
But drying can shrink them, and the support does weaken over time (although I must say, in the last two years they've made a few design improvements that have worked towards fixing this). So every few months when it's getting worn out, I get a new one at Staples for $15 (large tends to sell out first), and I use the 'old' one at home.
My 2 cents: If you have experienced wrist pain, or want to avoid it, invest in at least one of these. They're well-constructed, a great value, and much less expensive and painful than carpel tunnel surgery.
Buying a few SmartGloves a year? About $30-60. Not having burning wrist pain and weak hands? PRICELESS.
Rock Climbing (indoor or outdoor).
I used to have a mild case of CTS. I could only go about an hour before typing would become too painful. My wrist position while typing is pretty much as bad as could possibly be imagined, so that probably had something to do with it.
Then I started climbing. Climbing builds insane amounts of finger and wrist strength. I can now support my entire body weight (which has decreased by 30 lbs too!) hanging from any one of my fingers.
And my CTS is gone. Entirely. I routinely go 8-10 hours of continual typing (yes, I am a programmer) without any pain whatsoever. And my wrist position is as bad as ever.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"