Look, no hands
looknohands.me
looknohands.me
Also notised there were some questions about neck pains, If I adjust the nose-pad to the right level and angle it right it forces me to sit up straight. However, in the video my back is arched quite a lot because I was sitting at a table that was too low (but it was only a temporary setup).
Necessity is the mother of invention.
I use crazy input devices on crazy ways too. Magic trackpad and a 3d connection 3d mouse on a TV arm screwed to the wall along the computer screen so I can work standing up or with a stool.
A a lap-along wearable stenotype device instead of keyboard. Speech recognition for other things.
I can work much better, more comfortable and faster than anybody else after years of training.
As for my two cents, I like trigger points. I have used that technique effectively for years to eliminate angry pain. While the science is apparently still questionable, it is a simple method (find some painfully acute spots somewhere around sources of pain and massage it for 20 seconds or so, several times a day). It is talked about at the site above in addition to a variety of other pain management notions, mainly with a scientifically disappointing dose of reality mixed into it all.
Have you found yourself having different design ideas after this change? Or having developed a new style in your creations because of "mistakes" you make when you can't control your nose very well?!
Can you mention examples where you ended up designing differently?
I don't know (or care) what most people associate with "Genius", but I couldn't help that word from reverberating around my mind when I was reading about your setup.
I want to ask you so many things! Would you be open to an AMA (ask me anything) of some sort? A few things that I'm curious about:
General
* How do you click? Do you have tap-to-click turned on, or do you use press harder with your nose to trigger the magic trackpad's "click" threshold? If the latter, does your nose hurt after prolonger use?
* What kind of gestures do you have? What kind of gestures would you create, if you could create any gestures at all? Have you found third-party software to facilitate this? (I imagine the default software hasn't considered mouth gestures at all)
* Do you use this setup for your creative work alone, or for casual computer usage as well?
Performance & Accuracy
* You mention that you've gained the same level of accuracy as with your hands, and that's the most important factor (to me, at least). A secondary one, though, would be speed. Do you notice any considerable difference in your "input performance" when you use the nose/mouth setup vs. traditional input methods? How was your learning curve with respect to accuracy and then speed? (I'd expect you to have gained accuracy first and then built up performance over time)
* What's your pointer speed & acceleration like? I imagine both to be quite low, otherwise you'd have to perform very precise and minute movements in order to to high-precision stuff. For example, can you move your pointer from top-left corner of your screen to your bottom right with one movement? (I would think not). Is that the kind of thing that you'd complement with a mouse?
* Tangent on previous question: Are your "nosepad" settings (speed/accel) different than your trackpad/mouse settings? If not, is that a System limitation that you have accepted (optimizing for the nosepad, I'd imagine)?
Social
* Do you receive negative real-world reactions to your setup? Are people largely accepting & encouraging?
* What kind of feedback & reactions have you received online, after publishing this?
I'd like to emphasize again that I was blown away by your creativity. You exhibit the hacker spirit to the fullest. If you receive any hate because of this, I hope my enthusiasm counteracts that a bit :) I know that one negative comment can outweigh 1000 positive ones.
EDIT - more question(s)
* How has your posture evolved through time? I'd be surprised if you never had issues with your back/neck, but it seems that you've found the right posture that minimizes that strain.
Best wishes from Pakistan.
helps lots of musicians and others with repetitive injuries.
And sharing this. Bold. Lots of people would be afraid of ridicule. Remarkable.
Finally, much must be said about Omada Health, a company that looked past your handicap and allowed you to do things your way in a nurturing environment. They deserve huge praise and recognition for this.
I hope you are able to reach out to others who might be able to benefit from your ideas. I am sure your story will be inspiring to many even when not exactly in your shoes. Sometimes people just need to realize there might just be other ways to see their problems.
You need to be a featured speaker at a TED conference.
In case it helps others, here's a picture of a custom desk I designed and built many years ago as I started to suffer from carpal tunnel, elbow, shoulder and back problems. I am convinced paying attention to ergonomics saved my hands.
http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/wrist.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout
He recently discussed RSI in length in an episode of the Pragmatic podcast: http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic/episode-50-acci...
About a minute later he explains how the problem might not even be in your hands, it could be in your shoulder, for example, but you might feel the pain in your hands.
@1:16:25 keyboard discussion
@1:26:00 keyboard layouts
@1:36:10 Is it all in your head?
- Goldtouch GTU-0088 V2 Keyboard.
- Evoluent VerticalMouse 4, raised up on a book to be the same height as the keyboard.
- Single monitor at proper height.
- Hourly breaks to walk around.
- Motorized sit/stand desk, alternating after every break.
- Mindfulness meditation practice, which helps me be more sensitive to my body.
- Sitting up straight more often.
Have you tried any of these? How did they work out for you? What worked better for you?
I recently suffered some amount of tendonitis in my wrist and it prompted me to make quite a few changes:
* Better posture
* Better seat adjustment
* A nicer (mechanical) keyboard
* Practising touch typing more (i.e. correcting myself any time I use the wrong finger)
* Resting my wrists evenly
I made all these changes simultaneously so I don't know what changed it or if it was a one-time thing and resting fixed it. An interesting thing is that I found that I overuse my right hand.
`vim` binds simple movements to hjkl and that's fine because they're on the home row, but it also means that a lot of the time I'm holding down one key while reading code. I've switched to moving around code better now, using larger jumps, and when scrolling a lot I use my left hand. I've also rebound some other things so that they're easier with home row keys. Anyway, learning to be faster at all this took very little time. I am very impressed with how fast we learn new acts if they keep repeating them.
This is something I learned from my music teachers. I would get nervous while playing and my muscles would get all stiff leading to missed notes and sounding dry and whatnot. Most importantly, I was thinking about how to position my muscles to get the sound I wanted rather than thinking about the sound I wanted and letting the muscles do their thing. They made me realize your muscles needs to breathe and to use the window between impulses to relax them.
I could have the best posture, best keyboard layout and everything else but if my muscles stay contracted the entire time I'm working I'll definitely feel it at the end of the day. Be it on the guitar or computer.
Any irritated condition is characterised by inflammation. The most common medicines prescribed for RSI are anti-inflammatories. So it stands to reason that RSI is tissue-damage, caused by repetitive strain, and anywhere tissue damage is occurring immune mediated inflammation takes place.
Tenosynovitis is inflammation of the fluid-filled sheath that surrounds a tendon.[1]
So, the treatment we were taught was to address the physical injury by removing, retraining, or engineering the problem away, then give nutritional supplements that support tissue repair and help down-modulate the inflammatory response: Omega 3 EPA / DHA (fish oils), Quercetin, Rutin, Vitamin C, Bromelain, B12 & Folate, Magnesium (as citrate or diglycinate, or both), plus Turmeric and Ginger. And also give supplements that target musculoskeletal / connective tissues: Silica, proline, lysine, cysteine, glutamine, Manganese, B5, B6, Iron (as iron amino acid chelate), copper, zinc (as amino acid chelate). Where the condition has progressed to considerable over-all wear and tear of a join the also throw in Glucosamine and Chondroitin.
The theory goes: remove the mechanical cause of the condition (repetitive strain causing tissue damage) and the condition will resolve itself. Put in the nutrients the body needs to repair the damage and the condition will improve faster. Sometimes the damage is so far progressed it will respond much better if the nutrients are taken too.
Once the condition is under control we then direct the patient to look in to seeking advice to strengthen the affected joint.
I don't know about the state of nutritional medicine outside of Australia, but here we have some really good formulations available off the shelf and others as practitioner only formulas - so you need a consult.
I'll pre-empt the "supplements don't work" argument and say: yes, taking iron oxide or magnesium oxide doesn't do anything. There are formulations that are poorly absorb and poorly utilised by the body. Have a look in to, for example, magnesium diglycinate and magnesium citrate vs. magnesium oxide. Look in to mixed ascorbates with citrus bioflavanoids (Quercetin and Rutin) vs. pure Ascorbic Acid. High does Turmeric and Ginger work so well as anti-inflammatories and blood thinners they are contra-indicated if a person is taking blood thinners / blood pressure medication, eg Warfarin.
Anyway, getting carried away. Thought you might be interested.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenosynovitis
This does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your physician / nutritionist / pharmacist before taking any nutritional or herbal supplements.
Edit: formatting
That said, keyboard and monitor height properly adjusted probably help for many too... I don't bottom out with a mechanical keyboard.
For just paging through code, I've also mapped the space bar to be page down in command mode, which I find quite convenient.
I also started using a wacom tablet as a mouse replacement. The absolute positioning of the pen removes all these small-dragging-motions.
https://store.wacom.com/us/en/product/CTL480/
Which tablet is most effective as a mouse replacement?
1) Small sizes scale up surprisingly well, but one model bigger might be preferable.
2) One should test the feel of the pad -> there are different surface types (some are very glas-like, others offer more resistance), and different styles of pens, which all feel different.
3) I feel like many of the pens are quite uncomfortable to hold. If I had to use them for longer I'd probably look into finding 3rd party alternatives or a small pen I can embed into a custom grip. Different styles to exchange regularly (every 30 min or so) would also be nice.
I use an angled keyboard and a vertical mouse to reduce twisting.
This is not something about her capabilities, but about the limitation of current input devices regarding our hands.
This is the proof that using a touch pad with your nose is not worse that using it with your hand. There is something wrong in this: try using any real-world interface with your hand, how the shapes, the stiffness, the flexibility of any handle, pen, button, spring you interact with give you some kind of information and let you operate with a superior kind of consciousness.
Personally, I think we stumbled onto a design that works well after years of trials. When you look at children using tablets, for example, you quickly realize that they don't have the same dexterity as adults, yet they are able to use the device with almost the same capability as adults. With tablets in particular, I don't think this was an accident...
We could make input devices/interaction paradigms that are highly specific to one domain usable by only certain people because of learning curves or physical limitations, or input devices that can be used by anyone with sacrifice in speed and productivity.
We could have much higher precision, and add highly sensitive pressure sensitivity. For most tasks touch sensitive surfaces would be identical and equally easy to get into, except that they would allow for much higher ceilings of mastery and skill than they do now.
I think it's more a story about our adaptability in general.
Many years ago, I worked with a developer who happened to be blind. While coding, he used an audio screen reader. If you've ever heard one, you know that they can be set to read incredibly fast, such that it sounds like absolute gibberish to the untrained ear.
So, whereas I couldn't even discern the words/characters being read, it made absolute sense to him. Much as I was amazed by it, I also know that he didn't start there. Years of practice, finding shortcuts, etc. made it as much second nature to him as reading code on the monitor was for me.
Of course, it also didn't hurt that he was brilliant.
I also used to work as a personal assistant for a guy in a wheelchair who used Dragon Speakeasy, I think that was back in 2005 - '06ish, and was surprised how well he was able to use his PC. He also had a book turning machine that reliably turned one page at a time.
This also reminds me of people who ride bikes using echo location.[1]
I wonder if it's possible to generate a sound stream from video, and what sort of resolution and colour depth could be encoded in to the sound.
This TED talk by Daniel Kish is good too.[2]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_E3zxx2l9g 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRA-asTuP_Y
There was some work done on this. I don't remember how well it worked. I think this is it: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/sonar.htm
[0]: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
It seems that it's mostly people who grip their mouse really tightly/type with tense fingers that experience the most problems - I remember when I first started typing, my fingers tired too easily because the keys were heavy, and I was exerting a lot of force trying to get the fingers to exactly where I wanted them to go. Later, when I got a "looser" keyboard and discovered that I didn't really need to hit the keys exactly in the middle but whatever could actuate them worked, my speed more than doubled and I could type for hours without feeling tired at all. The relaxation really helps. Same with mousing - if you find that you have to grip your mouse tightly to make precise movements, turn down the DPI and try lubricating it so it requires as little effort as possible to move. Personally, I don't really like using trackpads because of that friction.
A mouse mat will often reduce friction greatly, and you can augment your mouse with custom teflon "feet". Gamer peripherals, basically.
I see a lot of people who just run their mice across their desk, which no doubt works, but is sub-optimal in that it's not a particularly durable surface in most cases. This will lead to scratches, and thus increased friction on top of the noise and now ruined surface.
Another thing I've seen is a really nasty build-up of gunk (for lack of a better term) underneath the mouse. All of this adds up to increased friction and a "sticky" feel at times, which results in erratic movement and possibly a need for tighter grip.
Then, of course, there's always the option to switch the mice out. A wired option will obviously forgo the batteries, lowering the weight of the unit, at a negligible convenience price.
When I started to get some pain in my wrists, I noticed it most when I was using photoshop and clicking a great deal. I tore apart an old USB mouse and wired a pair of foot switches in so I could click with my feet as well. It helped quite a bit. Now I rather prefer it, especially the right click action.
Ie, twin cursors on the screen, each controlled by a separate mouse? Tablets introduced a number of interesting new interface mechanisms - double tap, pinch, stretch etc. Could we bring these to non touch-screens?
You can check a story very similar to mine: http://www.pgbovine.net/back-pain-guest-article.htm
Disclaimer: I am CS PhD student in a top tier US school. Suffered from RSI, tried everything. Was cured by Dr. Sarno's technique.
BTW: that you're left hand started in so soon after is probably a good indication that this isn't entirely physical!
Sarno's stuff works (as you'll find plenty evidence of on the internet (e.g. http://www.satori.org/rist/)), but the theory it's framed in is pretty bad, so be prepared for that...
An alternative talking about the same stuff without annoyingly trying to theorize so much is (check out the reviews, you'll see the title is quite misleading): http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Recovery-Back-Neck-Pain/dp/09669...
This was a hardware and software project and I was doing it all. This meant lots of precise motion at times. Running Solidworks or Altium Designer often meant very accurate tiny movement while pressing down on a button. Horrible stuff for your wrist.
I had been exposed to just how bad this could get. I was friends with several people who did visual effects for motion pictures. Same kind of work. They ran 3D workstations for a dozen or more hours per day, every day. One fellow had to have surgery on both wrists due to the damage he caused. His was always in pain after that.
I decided I had to deal with the situation. I didn't want to end-up like that.
First decision was that mice and touch pads where horrible input devices. I tested everything and concluded that low friction thumb-operated trackballs were the best.
Beyond that, the relative angle of the hand to the forearm seemed to have a HUGE effect on causing inflammation, pain and injury. The flatter and more relaxed,the better. In fact, the most relaxed position had my hands drooping over the keyboard and trackball with virtually no tension on the upper tendons. This meant my standard desk had to go.
What I needed was a desk with a cavity into which my hands would droop and meet the keyboard or trackball. My forearms had to be fully supported in order to remove pressure from shoulders and posture.
I welded together a few iterations of the idea and ended-up with a desk that was just fantastic. I could work on this thing for 16 to 18 hours a day and have no wrist burn whatsoever. Of course, I also implemented regimented breaks and exercises, but the desk, as well as switching to a trackball, made the most difference.
I can't help but think this girl did herself huge damage by using the touch-pad for long hours. I particularly dislike touch-pads on laptops (of any make and model) the are in the wrong place and add tension to your tendons precisely where you don't want it.
As for Michelle, wow, what an amazing person she must be.
http://i.imgur.com/tFVcegp.jpg
That's what a garage hardware startup looks like! A bit of a mess but some of my most productive time was spent in that room designing hardware, writing FPGA, embedded and workstation code. Oh, yes, doing our website too. Crazy times.
It was a year and a half of 14 to 18 hour days, 7 days a week from inception to launch. Behind the camera there's the rest of the garage (two cars wide) full of manufacturing equipment. No cars have ever entered my garages in my life. No room for them.
The arm support is sanded down with 800 grit sandpaper and then treated with Tung oil. The edges are generously rounded. This makes it very smooth and comfortable.
I should also note that the underlying structure is welded steel. I tried drop-down trays on conventional desks. They are flimsy and have enough give to make them uncomfortable. The cavity on my desk is strong enough to stand on so it feels very solid during normal use.
And Control VR uses gloves but might prove to be very accurate: http://controlvr.com
The VR headsets are driving the development of this technology.
Related:
The second time, I was in a different country and was sent to a surgeon. He had no clue what RSI was and said that I should not worry until it gets worse and ready for Carpal Tunnel surgery. I said "no thanks" and found a sports therapist instead who was ready to help.
The main lesson here is that "see a doctor" does not always work. I am sure if I saw surgeon the first time, I'd be having some stitches on my wrists right now. Back then, RSI was not well known thing at all. Hopefully, it is more easily recognized now.
http://www.rsitips.com/cold-laser-therapy/
http://www.brooklinephysicaltherapy.com/page4/page18/
I've never heard it mentioned before.
Thanks for the inspiration Michelle
Also, good for her, finding a solution that works well for her, strange though it seems at first blush. I like her work, too.
Of course not, it's just selection bias. People without similar problems don't feel the need to provide contrasting (and unavoidably boring) stories.
I did have some keyboards that cause more "tired hands" than others in the past. I also prefer trackpads to mice. Lately I'm using Apple keyboard/trackpads.
Check out the Imak SmartGlove with Thumb, I can't use a computer without it. Well, of course I can but it is much less comfortable. The glove plus a Kensington Expert Mouse (which is actually a trackball with a scroll ring) plus a good chair (eg Steelcase Leap) will help a LOT.
To see a proper implementation, which allows someone to work at a high level, is awesome.
He does not use special devices, just big mouse and large AT/IBM keyboard.
If she is still doing thous 11-15 hour work days and her neck doesn't get tiered, I really think she might have had too hard of a grip on her mouse or just a bad mouse in general.
I sometimes feel pain in my pinky fingers when typing, forcing me to adapt to using only my other fingers.
I've been using my nose awkwardly a lot on Android Wear, and honestly, this article makes me much better about it. We have so many screens, so many interfaces, yet only two hands. Anytime I'm typing, driving, running, my nose does the job on the smartwatch. I'm sure a lot of people have been doing it.
I wish there was more studies regarding these, most that I find keep talking about gestures, which I think is overdoing things, which humans tend to do at first with every problem we try to solve.
Just kidding. Glad to see such resourcefulness.
I even happen to have one of those touchpads.
"The Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World"
http://www.vdmfk.com/worldwide/en.html
"VDMFK supports and promotes artists who, due to disability or disease, cannot create their works of art with their hands, but have to use their mouths or their feet."
It works better than you'd think. The PS4 trackpad isn't exactly brilliant, but I can move around the mouse and click on what I want to with some accuracy. Of course, the trackpad on the controller is very small and not very accurate, so it's not really practical for artwork or anything. But, with a better, larger trackpad, I can imagine this technique actually working. I might give it a shot at some point.
I am a bit worried about the inevitable neck and nose pain, though. I wish she had gone into a little more detail about how she avoids that. Maybe she just has a neck of steel?
For the curious, these are some other resources I've found about people working around RSI. Most of these are about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to code by voice, since that's what I'm most interested in, but I think it's still interesting.
There really needs to be a list somewhere for open-source workarounds to disabilities. To the best of my knowledge, there really isn't one.
Natlink + Dragon NaturallySpeaking:
(NatLink, which lets you make custom speech commands for Dragon in Python, is currently being developed at http://qh.antenna.nl/unimacro/index.html, but that site's pretty incomprehensible. The original author's site is at http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/welcomeapage.htm. It's pretty out of date, but explains the fundamentals of the system better, I think.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI (don't bother looking around, the source code of this was never released)
https://github.com/simianhacker/code-by-voice
https://github.com/tgrosinger/aenea-grammars
Libraries for using Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Linux with VMs:
https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/aenea
https://github.com/russell/damselfly
It seems a post about this kind of thing pops up about every other month or so. I'm thinking of showing off my system here when I polish it up a bit. It's not nearly as complicated as some of these other ones, but I'm beginning to get pretty close to normal typing speed coding by voice.
But the video like has a comment(1 week old) from Tavis Rudd linking github repository of his code : https://github.com/dictation-toolbox.
And about your setup, please do post it! :)
You can find my setup on GitHub fairly easily right now (my screenname's the same), but at the moment a good portion of the code is embarrassingly terrible. Making voice commands to code while using those voice commands to code is predictably awkward. Besides, I want to write some documentation on how to get it working and stuff.
I've seen this starting to popup in a few websites recently and it always annoys me.
Typically when reading something on the web I scroll as I go which means that when I get to the end of column one it's in about the middle of the screen. Now I need to scroll back in the opposite direction because the top of column 2 is now off the screen and then read back down again.
It really breaks the flow of reading.
Seriously though, that is awesome.
Had pain in my arm as well in the past (it was not very severe but annoying). Using a mouse with a trackball solved the issue for me.
This article seems like a gimmick by someone who wants to be special instead of using perfectly effective solutions. Or it is a joke.
There are very many causes for wrist pain, ranging from carpal tunnel syndrome to osteoarthritis. A bad posture might contribute to wrist pain, but even the best posture won't cure someone suffering from gout.
The author hasn't shared the reason for her wrist pain, most likely because she doesn't know the reason herself. She knows that her wrists hurt when she uses them too much.
Please don't belittle other people's ways of coping with imperfections.
I'd somehow managed to complete my first project course without making my RSI worseBut even if she had meant it that way, it's still presumptuous to claim a better posture would cure her.
I do agree it would have been nice to know more of the details of what went wrong, though, and why she seemed to experience severe RSI when some other people don't. (Like me - I probably don't use the mouse/trackpad as much as a designer, but I've been clacking away at the keyboard for 25+ years with no significant issues so far.)
[1] http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/carpal-tunnel-... -- If you feel tingling in your fingers when you type STOP TYPING seriously.
She called it RSI and described classic carpal tunnel. Without the additional detail provided by the author, carpal tunnel is consistent with here description.
http://www.amazon.com/Its-Carpal-Tunnel-Syndrome-Professiona...