Home Treatment for Repetitive Stress Injury

Back when I was seriously suffering from RSI, I spent time dreaming about what a safe, happy and healthy workstation would look like and came up with an entirely new sort of workstation.

My story is this: I had some pain in college, but my friends at the time were wonderful massage-a-holics and helped rub my aching shoulders enough to keep the pain at bay. But we all scattered to the winds after college. When I went to work full-time, I started a stressful marketing job that made me unhappy and uncomfortable. The long hours at my desk, and the friction with my new boss, made it a physical hell on my body and I developed serious pain and problems. After just 10 months of work, and 8 of them in physical therapy, I quit one day because I couldn’t take anymore. I took 6 months off to recoup. I was emotionally and physically devastated, wondering if I’d ever be able to have a healthy lifestyle and job.

My vision for a healthy workstation involved not just comfort, but physical fitness. To begin with, I’d changed my home computer station so I could stand while typing, and found this allowed me to wiggle my hips, dance, and just move around more while working on the computer. It encouraged healthier habits.

DDR had been popular a while, and game developers were already designing systems that helped people interact with systems in new ways. I thought, why couldn’t you have a completely revolutionary system, using full body movements to control the computer? Moving your head, your arms, your legs, in new ways would control the computer mouse, and maybe a new keyboard system could be developed too.

In addition to giving you incentive to move around, the system would tell you when to rest. When you were tired you could go back to typing at a traditional keyboard and mouse and sit down and relax. As you did more of the work in the revolutionary interactive system, you could “level up,” spend less time doing old-fashioned typing, and the system would evolve with your new fitness levels. It would give you new types of motions to perform and new physical activities, which would help you develop flexibility, strength and endurance.

I don’t have the skills to develop this kind of a system, nor the PR skills to market it to companies who are skeptical about spending money in a lagging economy, or even sell it to workers. Many computer workers, even those in pain, aren’t motivated enough to want to learn an entirely new mode of computer interaction. Businesses won’t want to spend the money and time to train workers.

But I think that slowly, desktop systems are changing. New input systems like foot buttons, mice controlled by head movements, and speech recognition programs are slowly gaining traction. Simulations and games are being used in more applications from health care, to user interface design, to robotics and science. As technology develops and we explore more possibilities, our systems have to change too. What route that takes depends on new awareness of the problem, and people’s willingness to make changes and adapt, as well as the attention researchers are willing to devote to creating and implementing new solutions.

This article at Usernomics lists some recent inventions in the realm of new tech interfaces. Will they become mainstream? It’s hard to tell.

Related posts:

1. Putting RSI in Perspective-Who’s at Risk?
2. Fast Tips for RSI Relief
3. Ten Tips for Safe Stretching
4. What the Ergonomist Can Do For You
5. Wear Gloves to Stay Warm While Typing