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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?
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.
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 :)