Computer injuries appear to come out of nowhere, but in reality they build up over months or years of doing exactly the same thing to your tired, neglected, yet uncomplaining body. After more than a decade of being a quasi computer geek, I thought it might be time to share some tips on what you might want to do differently to keep your body from falling apart!

First, an unnecessary word of warning. I’m not any kind of doctor and have never even played one on TV. The following is simply what I have learned from my own experience. It may or may not be appropriate advice for you.

First and most importantly, mice! These little squeaky guys are pushed, pushed, pulled, clicked and rubbed eight hours a day, yet they get minimal respect. Computer users spend very little money on their mouse compared to other electronic paraphernalia that they use far less often. But why? For €100 you can get a state of the art mouse. Why bother getting something cheap and nasty. If you have anything with a ball in it, please throw it out immediately or stop reading this article. You should be ashamed! Open it up and take a look at all the fluff and beads of grime accumulating around the rollers. That’s disgusting! You deserve more than that.

If you use CAD or Photoshop, what you really deserve is a mischief of mice (yes, that is the correct collective noun for mice). Repetitive stress injuries can be avoided by reducing the repetitive part. If you have 2 or 3 mice (all different) and you regularly switch, you’‘ll not only reduce you’re likelihood of injury, but your hand will appreciate it too.

Another habit that may help you in the long run is to switch hands. Using your left hand or other hand is much easier than you might think. A few practice and you’ll be fine. “Wrong-handed” mouse use is not nearly as difficult as wrong-handed writing. In fact, you might find that for some things like sketching, it is actually easier. Originally, I learned to use my left hand just to give my right hand a rest. It also made it easier to share a computer with my left-handed wife! Later on, when I had an accident with my right hand I was glad that I had made the effort.

Recommendations for mice? At the moment, I’m still quite keen on the Logitech LX7 mouse. It was originally purchased purely for a laptop during business trips. It has excellent battery life and is quite a bit smaller than the Logitech MX series mice that I use the rest of the time.

To reduce the number of movements of your mouse hand, consider getting a Spaceball. This will allow you to manipulate the model in 3D space – zoom, pan, rotate – with your “wrong” hand, ,while your mouse hand can concentrate on selecting menu items and geometric entities. These used to be quite costly. But now that 3DConnexion is owned by Logitech, you can get a 6 degree of freedom controller or “SpaceNavigator” for $60. Alternatively, you can pick up the classic (and still good) Spaceball 3003 for next to nothing on Ebay. The only downside here is that these are mostly connected using a serial cable rather than USB.

If you are a graphic artist, no doubt you spend most of the time using a stylus and tablet, such as the Wacom. Non-artists should also consider having one of these plugged in and available for use even if it is seldom used. I have even heard of tablets being used for Pro/Engineer!

Now we come to your keyboard. There are two choices to be made here: the shape of the keyboard and the layout of the keys. The first one is easy; avoid standard keyboards like the Apple one where the keys are layed out in a grid. Unless you are a praying mantis or have elbows attached to your rib cage, these are not good for you. Get something that allows for a more natural position. For example, I use the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic keyboard 4000. I’m not a fan of Microsoft, but it’s a good product.

Regarding key layout, this is largely a question of idealism versus pragmatism. I started off my career as an idealist, learning to use the Dvorak system rather than Qwerty. It’s faster and more efficient mainly because the home keys are the most commonly used ones: A,O,E,U,H,T,N,S. Its easy to adapt a regular keyboard to Dvorak. You can normally pull the individual keys off and move them to their new spots. You’ll then need to tell the computer that you want to re-map the keyboard. Simple instrucitons here…

Regarding monitors, its easy to get sucked into a discusion regarding choice of CRT or LCD, but the main focus should be how the monitor is used. Staring at the screen for hours on end is very bad for your eyes. Your eyeballs are designed to be constantly adjusting their focus, moving not just laterally but adjusting to focus on objects from the background to foreground. When you stare at a screen, your eyes are doing next to nothing. So look away frequently! Take regular walks to the water cooler or step outside. Or do eye exercises. You don’t even need to stand up! By the way, I prefer old-fashioned large CRTs. They may not be as pretty as a new LCD, but they are better at displaying CAD models in wireframe. You can also pick these up for a song on Ebay.