Review: Ergonomic Keyboards Ease Strain

Thursday, May 26th 2005, 9:40 am

By: News On 6

A decade ago, there was much talk about keyboards causing repetitive motion injuries. Attention was focused on ergonomics and leading manufacturers including Microsoft introduced special curved and split keyboards.

If you're like me, though, those keyboards didn't solve the problem. Months ago, I started getting tingling and numbness is my lower left arm, probably the result of typing. It wasn't painful, but the odd feeling occasionally made it hard to sleep. The phenomenon isn't uncommon among my colleagues.

I decided this was a good time to test a new generation of ergonomic keyboards that break a rule of keyboard design you've probably never thought about.

Take a look at your keyboard. See how the rows are shifted so they don't line up in columns? That's a relic from the time the keys were attached to the levers of a mechanical typewriter. They had to be offset so the levers didn't collide, but that design serves no function on an electronic keyboard. It persists even on most ``ergonomic'' keyboards.

The offset rows cause a lot of unnecessary finger and wrist movement, according to TypeMatrix, maker of one of the keyboards I tried. Their keyboard, the EZ-Reach 2030 ($110 from the TypeMatrix Web site), has none of the standard features of other ergonomic keyboards: it's not contoured or split. In fact, it's so flat and small it looks like it might have been ripped from a laptop. The most unusual feature is that the keys line up in a grid.

It's incredibly disorienting to have the keys line up this way.

Every time your finger moves from the home row, the key is not quite where you expect it to be. For weeks, typing was for me the equivalent of trying to talk with a sock stuffed in my mouth.

What about hand position? Getting the hands and wrists in the right position is the whole point of most ergonomic keyboards. The intent of the TypeMatrix is that you angle your arms toward the board, leaving your wrists straight. This means the fingers are at angle to the grid of the keys. This is not quite easy and I found myself bending my wrists now and then.

I took me a good three weeks to get somewhat accustomed to the keyboard and, even then, I was making more errors than usual.

But switching to the EZ-Reach did something. The numbness started receding. I'm not sure if this is because the mere act of changing keyboards relieved overused tendons or if the keyboard really did what it was supposed to. A small study cited by TypeMatrix showed that 21 of 24 participants who complained of Repetitive Strain Injury before switching to TypeMatrix felt better after five weeks, so I'm willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt.

The least likable part of the TypeMatrix was having the Enter and Backspace keys in the center of the board. They're placed there to minimize some of the strain on the little fingers, which have a lot to do on a standard keyboard. The problem with having them in the center is that the index fingers need to stretch quite a bit to reach them.

The $289 Contoured Ergonomic Keyboard from Kinesis also lines the keys up in a grid. Otherwise, it's very different. It splits the keys into two widely separated concave ``cups,'' one for each hand. It goes even further in offloading the little fingers by putting Enter, Delete and other commonly used non-letter keys under the thumbs.

I found the Kinesis board very comfortable. The cup-shaped keypads mean only minimal movement is needed to hit each key, and the hands move very little. The wide separation of the keypads mean the arms don't need to angle in.

Getting the thumbs to cooperate was the tough part. They're used to having an easy job at the keyboard, and it took about three weeks to make them smart enough to distinguish between 12 keys.

Either board seems to alleviate my symptoms, and should be considered if you have problems with your keyboard. Of course, you should do hand exercises and consult a doctor as well.

The Kinesis is more comfortable but its build is a little disappointing for something that costs ten times as much as a standard keyboard. It feels plasticky and its deep body produces a mildly unpleasant resonance when typing. It also takes up twice as much desk space as the TypeMatrix.

Whichever you pick, get two: one for home and one for office. They take time to get used to, but you'll find regular keyboards quite unnatural once you've switched to one of these. And if they prevent Repetitive Strain Injury, they're worth their weight in gold.