Thursday, October 18, 2007

The Apple Blog - Fighting Repetitive Stress Injury

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  • Fighting Repetitive Stress Injury

    The Problem

    About a month ago my right shoulder started feeling really sore. But I kept blogging, typing, programming away. And that night the pain was so bad I couldn’t sleep. My doctor diagnosed bursitis (Dictionary: “Bursitis: inflammation of a bursa, typically one in the knee, elbow or shoulder.”) (Dictionary; “Bursa: a fluid-filled sac or saclike cavity, esp. one countering friction at a joint.”) She gave me some exercises to do, a prescription, a mandated 4 day vacation from the computer, and strongly suggested a new office chair and mouse.

    The Solution

    New office chair, no problem, my old one was slowly falling apart. My entire desktop though was something else. I have piles of paper stacked on nearly every flat surface near the computer, books to read, manuals to help me, and lots of cables hooked to my Powerbook (power, speaker cable to my monitor, monitor cable, ethernet, firewire 800 cable to my hard drive, USB cable to my keyboard, then the mouse cable from my keyboard, iPod charger on firewire). So long term, I’m looking at getting a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Maybe I’ll use Airport on my next computer if 802.11n is fast enough. That removes some clutter.

    The Gear

    I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M scanner. I’ve now scanned literally thousands of sheets of paper, and a huge part of the clutter on my desk, and kitchen table, and file cabinets, is gone.

    I tried the Apple Mighty Mouse, and I hated it. I figured a trackball might be better anyway, so I ended up getting a Logitech Marble Mouse. The Marble Mouse is ok, definitely less strain on my wrist and arm. But I really miss the scroll wheel on my mouse. The scroll up and down buttons on the sides of the Marble Mouse are in a horrible position, so I think I am moving the mouse more to get to the scroll buttons on the top and bottom of the right scroll bar.

    I also installed a cool little program called AntiRSI. AntiRSI simply keeps a countdown timer, and every 4 minutes, you have to take a 13 second pause. During the pause you can’t type or move the mouse. If you type or mouse, the pause timer resets. During those few seconds, I shake out my hands and wrists, or stand up and stretch. And then every 50 minutes, an 8 minute break is forced, although you can postpone the break if you must finish the thought you are working on. All of the times are configurable, so explore to see what works best for you. Sometimes the pauses or breaks are annoying, but it was much more annoying paying for medicine, X-rays, and not being able to use a computer for a few days.

    For more on RSI, this Google notebook on Repetitive Stress Injury is useful.

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