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Comment by birdman3131 | Hacker News Reader

"So this thing’s main job is to help us stay off our phone, since touch screens are the hardest on the health of our hands."

I have never heard this before. On the other hand I have heard about keyboards being an issue many times. Anybody else know anything about touchscreens being harder on hands than keyboards?

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I can only speak for myself but I find using a smartphone upright one-handed for longer than a few minutes uncomfortable because of the bizarre positions it forces my fingers and palms into. It's a flat, slate-like object and our hands are designed to grip round things that protrude into our palms. I also need to keep my thumb free to use the touchscreen and my hands are on the smaller side so I end up balancing it on a protruding pinky and contorting the inside back edge of my hand. It's no problem for me to use two hands or hold it in a screen-up orientation but holding it in front of me for more than a minute isn't fun (despite having decent dexterity and grip strength from deadlifting, typing, playing instruments, etc).

I do wish landscape typing hadn't gradually gone by the wayside. I used to be a firm landscape-typer and found it much more comfortable for my hands, but I've accepted that phones just aren't designed for it anymore - too often the keyboard fills too much of the screen to see the textbox adequately.

I sometimes tend to let my phone fall into the nook of where my pinky finger meets my hand, when I want to hold it near-vertically/upright. I can agree that this doesn't really work well long-term, it's much more comfortable to hold it flat since it's less likely to simply fall out of my hand (...) that way.

I occasionally brace my index finger against the top edge of the display; this used to work great on my Note 3 with its giant bezel (particularly at the top), my current Mate 20 Pro's notched edge-to-edge screen doesn't play well with this though :(

I defintely find "large" phones to be very uncomfortable and cramping to use for more than a few minutes. Thats why I haven't upgraded from my first gen iPhone SE. Thats even a little too big--the iPhone 4 and previous iPhones were the perfect size. I'm not a heavy smart phone user, but for the two weeks I had an XS, it was the most difficult phone I ever had. I couldn't hold onto it, and was dropping it constantly. So I gave it to my brother and bought another SE used (before the XS, I had an SE that got water damaged.)

If you are holding a mobile phone in a hand your palm and fingers (thumb) are more or less in the same position. Take a look at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5546699/, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440311/, https://www.toi-health.com/physician-articles/effects-smartp... and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000368701... just to name some articles.

None of the studies you linked concluded any significant findings. The most significant, which was unremarkable, was from the first:

"There is limited evidence that MTSD use, and various aspects of its use (i.e. amount of usage, features, tasks and positions), are associated with musculoskeletal symptoms and exposures. This is due to mainly low quality experimental and case-control laboratory studies, with few cross-sectional and no longitudinal studies."

That tripped me up for a few minutes. I decided that since the author is using we in the singular not plural so it is that person's experience only and not meant to be a blanket statement. Also, I can only assume that the author meant a touch screen on a phone and not, say, a touch screen on a laptop because I can't imagine how that is difficult on someone's hands.

"our" is not the royal we here, this person refers to themselves with a plural sounding pronoun for identity reasons. They are not making a statement about ergonomics generally even though of course I can see how that can be confusing.

There's nothing really hard on healthy people when we use touchscreens, but this person clarifies they are disabled so this sounds like an edge case for them because if you're disabled in some ways, a nice fat keyboard is just going to be a lot more gentle on your hands and fingers than the tiny thumb keyboards of mobile devices.

Additional context: this is a person who wrote a brainfuck interpreter in sed on my couch using an iPhone. I tend to trust their input as to typing comfort implicitly.

They're too powerful for glass.

That's hilarious (and very impressive), but also not applicable to the vast majority of humans that use touch screens! I mean, just how much do people type on touch screens?

That touchscreens are not conducive to significant typing seems like an additional point against them (and this matches my experience).

Yeah, I hit that sentence and was hoping for more details.

Smartphones are hell for thumbs and index fingers

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