Is Your Keyboard Killing You?

It's a fact: Computer keyboards and mice wreck your body. They strain your wrists and fingers, they stress your elbows, and they abuse your arms, shoulders, and back. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the number of hand and wrist-related workplace injuries tripled between 1983 and 1993. As computers become a more and more unavoidable part of our daily lives, why hasn't anybody come up with a way of using them that doesn't destroy your health?

Actually, they have, but what they've come up with doesn't look much like your standard keyboard. Take the Twiddler, a fully functional keyboard the size of a mouse that's meant to be used with one hand. The Twiddler, which is compatible with Windows, Unix, and Palm Pilot-based machines, uses an approach called "chording": It has only eighteen keys -- twelve for the fingers, six for the thumb -- but by pressing different keys in combination, you produce all the keystrokes of an ordinary keyboard. The Twiddler also contains motion sensors that allow it to act as a mouse.
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