Smart To Touch: Project 1

The three primary risk factors of Repetitive Strain Injury are overuse, bad gesture and bad technique. The primary warning sign of RSI is pain in the upper extremities (fingers, palms, wrists, forearms, shoulders). The pain can be burning, aching, or shooting. It could be local or the entire forearm). Typically the pain increases as you keep using your computer. During this project I made a computer mouse that prevents people from getting RSI.

After a physiotherapist’s consultancy, our next step was to define which method of interaction was best. We decided to try out two different interaction methods: tilting and pushing a pillow on different places. Some former ideas, like the joystick-like mouse were eliminated as they made people assume the exact pose and movements we were trying to avoid.

We made a working prototype of our interaction ideas. The first interaction idea was a mouse mat, where the user could push buttons to move the cursor in 4 directions (left, right, up, down) and to do a left mouse click with a button on the left and right mouse click with a button on the right. The prototype was at the size that the user had to move their hand slightly to move all the buttons. The other mouse made the user move the cursor by tilting the mouse. A pressure sensor enabled the user to left click (when pressed lightly) and right click (when pressed thoroughly). To test our products, we let fellow students perform some simple tasks, like moving the mouse around and closing windows on a computer.