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Has Anyone Tried the Quill Mouse?
Anonymous Coward asks: "Has anyone at Slashdot has heard of or used the Quill Mouse? It's an odd shaped mouse that's supposed to reduce repetitive stress injuries like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome." Rather than grabbing and moving the Quill mouse with your hands, you rest your hand in the Quill's "nook" and move the entire assembly with your arms. Since the palm of your hand is facing inward, you can then click the buttons which have been rotated to match the "nook". The web page says this hand position is less likely to cause RSI than the position a standard mouse requires. Anyone with (or who have used) a Quill Mouse care to comment?
Here's an uninformed question: is RSS actually cured by changing the position of the hand, or is this treating the symptoms? I've got nothing against selling relief for a problem, but does it really fix the problem?
i bought an Evoluent Vertical Mouse from ergo recently, and i like it a lot. (that's a canadian store, and the price is in canadian dollars. for those from the US, that may be attractive.)
unlike the Quill, it has 5 buttons (including the wheel button), and thus easily replaced my MS explorer trackball. using a Quill i would really miss those other two buttons. it also has a smaller footprint, since your hand surrounds it, rather than being surrounded by it.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
While I wish this firm the best of luck, I believe there is a flaw in their system. I remember somewhere about one of the reasons why the touch screen failed (is still not in common use) is that it, like the Quill, relied on the muscles of the upper arm to move the hand around the screen to click (technically touch) the controls. Well, the muscles of the upper armed are designed to provide great force, as opposed to accuracy. The end result was that peoples upper arm got tired far more quickly than the wrist would, and people felt like they had "gorilla arm".
Now, I have not used this product, nor will I ever; a childhood injury prevents my wrists from rotating in the way necessary to use their mice. Therefore, they may have a perfectly reasonible way of handling the moevments. I'm just worried about their blanket assumption that the shoulder is superior tot he wrist.
with both this mouse and with the vertical mouse mentioned, that you have to move your whole arm. For me, I notice that I rarely do this. I keep my palm pretty much stationary and move the mouse with only my fingers. I would get anoyed quick if I had to use my whole arm, and probably tired too.
The one thing I like about the vertical mouse idea is that this could allow you to flex your grip, like you would with a squishy ball -- which I have found helps the pain go away.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I suspect the reason is that my right arm, being dominant, applies too much force for the task, which then requires counterforce from other muscles top control the fine movements needed for the mouse, resulting in unrelkeased tenmsions through the whole muscle group. Meanwhile the non-dominant left arm just gets on with the job. It takes about a day to reprogram your hand for the buttons and then forget it. Better still, work smarter, use the keyboard shortcuts wherever possible.
Changing positions like that may well help, but be warned that the explanation they give is, well, crap. RSI isn't really well understood, but (in the case of carpal tunnel disease) it's pretty certainly not because of lack of blood flow.
As to the issue about moving the arm rather than the fingers, those of us who are old enough to have had real penmanship classes remember that this is the way we were taught to write, too. After my own bout of RSI (caused by playing rogue for about 36 hours straight during grad school) I retrained myself to keep my wrists straight while typing (instead of resting them on the keyboard) and to use my armj rather than my hand for the mouse, and have since had no trouble.
Knock wood.
ExtremeTech has a review on the Quill Mouse along with a vertical-split keyboard. The reviewer found that the mouse was comfortable to use... but the thing does look funny :)
Okay, so if I put one ounce of pressure on my thumb tip it is the exact same as ten ounces on my thumb--and ends up being tens of tons a year?
I use VI in the console and ALT+Tab my way to various different screens, so I doubt I do 10,000 mouse clicks a day; let alone 2 million a year. So, I suppose, in following their arguement, that I don't walk two kilometers on my hands.
My eyelid blinks once very two seconds, 16 hours a day--or 28800 blinks. That's 10.5 million blinks a year. Again, following their logic, the amount of weight moved is, let's say two grams a blink. Oh, my God, my eyelids lift 21 metric tons! No wonder they hurt looking at their web site!
And, my hands hurt using a damn mouse, so I use a pen pad. Unfortunately, now I have a scribes callous.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
my wrist stays steady while my entire arm moves,
with the buttons on the side at a better angle.
For me, it helps reduce fatigue and tension.
Downside is that tiny motions are trickier,
like it's difficult to hit pixels in Photoshop.
Have you looked at touchpads and rollerballs?
Cheers, Joel
P.S. maybe this page will help you? RSI reviews
A cool website called Slashdot.org recently had a link to an article at extremetech where it was reviewed along with a vertical keyboard.
Slashdot's original story about them is here...
Seriously, though, the extremetech article was a good read.
I tried it, but being left-handed.. it caused more RSS than any other mouse. It was very painful turning my left hand to the direction of this mouse and it was very difficult to steer.
Maybe when they release a left-handed version I'd remotely think about using one of these horrible things (as all right-handed mice are horrible).
I also think that right-handed mice should be illegal to put into public places without also providing left-handed mice... apparently the ADA disabilitiess act doesn't apply to this as 'left handed people can choose to use their right hands'.. yeah, right.
A few years ago, after becoming completely sucked into using the computer for hours at a stretch more or less every day, I began to notice slight twinges of discomfort in my right (mousing) hand. Realizing this was the early stage of an RSI and having read all sorts of unpleasant things about them, I switched the mouse to the left hand; I didn't have quite the same fine control with that one, but for things like surfing and whatnot it didn't matter. Around that time I also bought a trackball, which I intended to use principally for old arcade games under MacMAME, but I wound up using it as a mouse alternative as well. Between switching hands and switching mice a lot, or sometimes using both at once (one in each hand, and switching from one hand to the other on the fly), I apparently haven't ever repeated patterns of hand/wrist movement long enough to get a bad RSI. Unfortunately I have just one mouse at the moment, but I make sure to switch hands with it from time to time, and I intend to get a new trackball as well, and again switch between that and the mouse as well as switching hands.
And pain immediately went away.
http://www.contourdesign.com
(say in a singsong voice)
It *does* turn your wrist, but less so than this one. They have multiple sizes of mice for both left and right hands. They *don't* have a mouse wheel, but the action of using a mouse wheel, that scruntch of your hand, is exactly the problem of ergonomics you should be fixing.
Has anyone seen a vertical rollerball mouse? Perhaps that would eliminate the need for upper-arm control, and eliminate the unusual twisting of the arm.
(I haven't used a regular rollerball, so I don't know if they have other disadvantages)
To point a mouse it must be gripped, for things to happen it must be clicked.
"Gripped" implies holding tightly onto the mouse. I think most people just kind of rest their hands lightly on their mice. If you press too hard it gets all sticky and jams in the mousemat.
Has anybody tried substituting the mouse with the Igesture Pad? The range of movements should mean a more relaxed position and be less repetitive, but it looks like a big chance. Any experiences?
This is like the little rubber things they put on school children's pencils when they refuse to hold them correctly. It's just a way to force you to abandon a bad habit. If you don't like using a regular mouse in a way that won't cause you pain, then you won't like using this mouse either.
People do the weirdest, seemingly unnatural things with their wrist when using computers. I really don't understand where these habits come from. Perhaps it's a lack of training early on? Using a computer keyboard should produce similar wrist movements to using a piano keyboard: hardly any. Rotate your whole arm when typing on a traditional keyboard, don't pivot your wrist. Turn your mouse speed all the way up and only move the mouse with your fingertips, or turn the speed way down and move your whole arm.
If those things are too annoying for you, ergonomic input devices will be annoying too, because all they do is force you to move in a healthy way.
I've used both of thease trackballs and they greatly limit carpal tunnel damage.
Logitech and also Shudder Microsoft
Both reduce the amount of wrist movement, I use the MS one at home and an older version of the one shown from logitech at work.
I am a figment of my own imagination.
I didn't know how much pseudomedical jargon you could fit into a single webpage... Quill really packed it in; might be a new record.
RSI has little to do with blood flow; it's most often a matter of repetitive trauma. Working with a jackhammer will traumatize you, and cause problems over time... but there is considerable debate in the Orthopedic Surgery community about whether keyboarding etc even causes RSI. Several Orthopedic colleagues I've spoken to are adamant that, based on the literature, typing/mousing is NOT causative for RSI (they were very clear on that point, despite coming from a speciality that makes big bucks doing carpal tunnel releases... good to see them bucking a potential conflict of interest).
Also, the statement that muscle contraction amongst big and small muscles are what the body uses to move blood to the extremities is wrong; your arterial pressure does that job. VENOUS return FROM the extremities can be enhanced by large muscle contraction, but NOT arterial flow.
Pain from insufficient blood flow is called "claudication," and it's distinct from RSI; RSI comes from trauma and inflammation, not from arterial insufficiency (IAAD, BTW)
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
...The mouse will never be a successful input device.