Doctor Warns of the Hidden Danger of Touchscreens

snydeq writes "Dr. Franklin Tessler discusses the hidden stress-related injuries of touchscreen use, and how best to use smartphones, tablets, and touch PCs to avoid them. 'Touchscreen-oriented health hazards are even more insidious because most people aren't even aware that they exist. The potential for injury from using touchscreens will only go up ... as the rise of the touchscreen means both new kinds of health hazards and more usage in risky scenarios,' Tessler writes, providing tips for properly positioning touchscreens and ways to avoid repetitive stress injuries and eyestrain."

Comments

My wrist hurts!

[coldsalmon]

I'm wearing a wrist brace right now because I held my Nook Color one-handed for too long over the course of a couple of weeks. Obviously I can't say for sure that this was the cause of my pain, but it gets worse when when I hold it in one hand only, and better when I use both hands or support it some other way. I wish I had thought of this before I started using the Nook. Yeah it's not a problem of national concern, and the article uses absurdly alarmist rhetoric, but these are real sources of pain and it's always good to have tips on how to avoid pain.

Because it pertains to nerds

[Compaqt]

What are you talking about? Good on you for having great health.

Meanwhile plenty of geeks suffer from computer-related health problems. The most common up to now has been carpal tunnel or repetitive stress syndrome.

The advent of touchscreens means people are bending their necks downward for extended periods. For many/most it may not be a problem.

For others, it can result in cervical spondylosis, a debilitating condition of the neck.

The reason for such articles is to encourage people to take preventive measures. One of the best is Workrave, a break reminder program for Win and Lin. Click to install. (Deb/Ub/Mint)

Re:Because it pertains to nerds

[tlhIngan]

The advent of touchscreens means people are bending their necks downward for extended periods. For many/most it may not be a problem.

I doubt that. People have been reporting problems before touch screens. Blackberry users, for example, but also people who text a lot on their non-touchscreen phones.

The medical condition is real, but the cause is not - it's not a recent thing brought on the explosion of touch screens - it's been around for years. Notably brought on because the folks with blackberries (out over a decade) tend to be older businesspeople and thus experienced it years before. Or people texting on their phones for nearly two decades now. And young kids have been glued to their Nintendo portables for nearly 2 1/2 decades.

Re:Why is this crap even on Slashdot?

[jdgeorge]

Touchscreens are awesome, and they are the future of a lot of human-computer interaction. They're simply not a substitute for a real keyboard, or a properly arranged physical workspace.

Re:Why is this crap even on Slashdot?

[shutdown -p now]

They're only good when you're doing very basic operations which don't require much control.

Which covers surprisingly many activities (time-wise). You listed one yourself - book reading. Now also think newspapers, and everything else online that's "consume only" - i.e. where you don't rush to post a witty comment as soon as you read it, as is the case on Slashdot.

The perfect device would have both touchscreen and keyboard+mouse/trackpad/trackpoint, and will adjust to whatever controls you're using at the moment. We're already seeing this emerge with Asus Transformer, Lenovo Thinkpad tablet, and other similar devices on hardware side, and Win8 (and, to some extent, Android) on software side.