ERGO SUM

Dick Pountain/25 September 1998/Idealog 50

Around a year ago in Idealog 37 I explained how I came to give up using a mouse in favour of a Wacom graphics tablet, to avoid incipient RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury). It seems however that I spoke too soon, because exterminating my rodent was not the end of the story, and I hope that by revisiting this subject I may assist anyone who's having similar problems.

After six months or so I became devoted to the ArtPad (and could never now return to a mouse) but I discovered that while the pain in my forearm and wrist had cleared up, I was beginning to feel twinges in the upper arm and shoulder. A period of experiment and observation revealed the cause: when my office chair is set at the correct seat height its arms are an inch or two lower than the work-surface, and so don't support my arms when extended. In that earlier column I said that I'd invested in "a fully adjustable office chair and an ergonomic keyboard", but that wasn't entirely true - that chair is adjustable for tilt and height only, but you can't alter the height of its arms relative to the seat.

Any reader who thinks I'm making a lot of fuss about nothing has never experienced RSI pain, or much worse, the implied threat it poses to the livelihood of a professional writer (or musician, or other hand-worker). Trust me, it's worth spending time and money to avoid it. My ex-colleague Jon Udell of Byte magazine spent all day for many years typing copy, code and single-handedly running several very active newsgroups, and it caught him badly. His solution was to build a special chair, adjustable in every possible dimension and with separate left and right-hand keypads at the end of each arm on adjustable pivots. Lacking that level of expertise or determination, I made a few futile attempts to strap on cushions using motorcycle bungees, then glumly concluded that buying a new chair with adjustable arms would be cheaper and more flexible than jettisoning the large wooden table that I work on. Oh boy was I wrong.

I trekked around every office furniture showroom in London, expecting to find a plethora of attractive, inexpensive and innovative writing chairs, but instead I encountered the Invasion of the Grey Plastic Creatures from Hell. It appears that most of the world's office chairs are now made in the same Far-Eastern factory from recycled Lego bricks, and they look like StarFleet-surplus from the bridge of the original Starship Enterprise. Worse still, most of them have only vestigial arms, feeble loops of black plastic that allow limited height adjustment or none at all. All claim (and I'll not deny the claim) to conform to various EC ergonomics regulations, but it transpires that those regulations do not value arm support.

Another eye-opener was the irrational price variation: these horrid things sell for £300 and upwards in shops, but you appear to be able to buy the same products from various mail-order catalogues starting at £49.99 (not that I wanted one at any price.) Occasionally I'd stumble across something I liked, in black leather, and each time discovered that a) it cost over £700 and b) its maximum seat height was two inches too low for me. 

Eventual triumph came after my spouse steered me to a shop called Back 2 in the "medical mile" of Wigmore Street, which specialises in chairs for back sufferers. The bad new was that their chairs are very expensive indeed - many costing over £1000 - but the good news was that they took ergonomics very seriously. While trying out several delightful chairs that I had no intention of purchasing my eyes fell upon a weird little gadget clamped to one of the desk tops. It's manufactured in Finland, called the Ergo Rest, and it looks like a miniaturised version of those free-swivelling brackets you use to suspend TV sets from the wall. It's beautifully made of cast light alloy, and the movable end bears a small padded 'saddle' you rest your arm in. You can type, move the mouse or even make a Marmite sandwich without lifting your arm at all - and you can adjust Ergo Rest's height relative to your work-top, to the very millimetre, by turning a small knob. At £50 Ergo Rest is hardly cheap, but I saved several hundred by keeping my old chair. 

Interestingly there's a diagram in the Ergo Rest instruction sheet that depicts an ideal working posture quite at odds with previous advice I've seen. Their recommended angle at the knee, waist and elbow joints is 100 degrees rather than a right-angle, which leaves you slightly reclining with arms a little extended, rather than bolt upright - precisely my own favoured posture, but only if you have adequate arm support.

To complete the job I customised my ergonomic keyboard by using two rubber door-stops to raise its front edge a whole inch (ie. the exact opposite to the effect of those folding legs that many keyboards have.) This allows my wrist-joint to remain straight while typing. I pinched this trick from a new ergonomic keyboard being developed by Acer I was shown last year in Taipei (which also had a central lap-top-style touchpad surrounded by cursor buttons instead of a mouse.) Is there a moral to this story? I'd say so: with ergonomics, as with other health scares like margarine versus butter or fat versus carbohydrate, don't assume the experts know it all; they don't and the results are still coming in. And don't just ignore aches and pains, keep trying different configurations until they stop.