There are so many ways today to fritter away huge amounts of our time in our new virtual worlds. Have you ever played a video game and noticed how 3 hours of your life just disappeared?

Technology has brought us immense benefits as a society, but it has also made us slaves to a great extent, and we spend ever increasing amounts of time interacting with devices whether they be computers, mobile phones, PDAs, games consoles, MP3 players, GPS or TV remotes.

A substantial portion of employment now involves working on computers, whether it be the inputting/analysing of data, or the creation of the latest software that controls our lives. The trouble is that, the more high technology we introduce to our lives, the more time we spend interacting with it, often to the disadvantage of our health. It’s not too hard to imagine that, if current trends continue, there will be a technological gadget to interact with from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep (or more scarily from the moment we are born until the moment we die!).

The Web has expanded the information available at our fingertips by a staggering amount. It has also changed the way we spend large amounts of our leisure time (news surfing, watching videos, e-shopping, chatting, talking, sharing photography, socialising, network gaming, browsing) but this has come about at the expense of our health since we are now sitting in a sedentary posture for hours on end making small repetitive movements with our arms, hands and eyes, often in a slouched, bad posture. Before the Internet was available, we obtained our information from books, magazines, newspapers, talks etc which at least involved a walk to the newsagent, library, pub, town hall etc. Socialising was solely done by interacting with people you physically met, and gaming involved running around the public park kicking a football. Nowadays the exercise involved is often no more than climbing out of bed and turning the computer on, and we wonder why obesity rates are spiralling out of control! Not only do we have all this technology available, but we also feel compelled to use it for longer (often hours at a time) in a way that we never did with other more conventional pastimes.

The one thing that all of this technology has in common is that it has forced us to replace lots of big movements with lots of small, repetitive movements, and spend many hours interacting with virtual worlds on a small screen instead of interacting with the real world. It has disassociated us from reality, and made us feel like this virtual world is hugely important, so much so that we can’t imagine life without it. It has led us to be at a heightened risk of developing many types of problems including the very real threat of Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSIs). It has also just as worryingly made serious addicts out of all of us.

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The UK has a high rate of mobile phone use for texting (we are a nation of texting addicts!), and it is highly prevalent in the under 20 age group. Texting of course is the act of creating a text message on a small mobile device, with either a standard numeric phone pad with alphabetical letters encoded in the pad or a full mini sized keypad with a key for each letter/character. Irrespective of the key count that these small devices have, they all have something in common and that is very small repetitive motion of the fingers and mainly thumbs, in a very confined location.

I first encountered such a device in 2001 when I had my first text messaging pager with tiny full keypad. As an RSI sufferer back then, I was interested to see how it felt to use. Of course being a thumb typing device, it was easier for me to use (since my pain was mainly located in my fingers and arms). However, after a few weeks of repeated messaging, I began to notice pains in the thumbs developing. I also found my wrists aching too. I began to realise that these devices are just as dangerous to use as a computer mouse and keyboard. It hit me then that any small micro-motion using any device for long periods of time has the potential for causing RSI. You are especially vulnerable if you use a computer frequently or indeed have RSI symptoms from another source already.

A lot of people are surprised to find out that RSI is not solely a computer use problem. It can occur in anything that involves small repetitive motions of the hand, fingers and arms. What we are doing these days, however, is maximising our exposure to RSI through the wide array of technology gadgets and their related interactions in our lives. With text messaging (along with the equally addictive computer/console gaming) , there is a whole generation of youth (like this 8 year old girl) who are being exposed to RSI from an early age (and it is the young who are going to be more susceptible to RSI because their bones and muscles are not as fully developed as adults), which could break into epidemic proportions by the time they are older and looking for employment in a highly computerised world.

Phone service providers are also recognising the potential danger. One of them, Virgin Mobile has even got a web site called ‘Practice Safe Text‘ dedicated to avoiding text message RSI injuries.

Finally a statistic to ponder (from the linked article, keep in mind by 2008 the figure will be larger):”Each day, almost 100 million texts are sent in the UK”, a large portion of which are non-essential. This staggering statistic highlights the huge potential for problems resulting from repetitive strain injuries.

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• computers (mice/keyboards) for our work, gaming, web surfing, emailing, blogging, socialising
• organisers to plan our lives
• mobile phones for text messaging, web surfing etc
• other hand held email devices
• mp3 players
• digital cameras
• laptops
• game consoles
• TV remotes and 100’s of channels to hop

What do all these devices have in common?

We spend an ever increasing portion of our daily lives interacting with them, often in a very unergonomic and repetitive manner (small repetitive motions with our arms, wrists, fingers and thumbs). Many of the gadgets themselves require computer interaction.

By interacting with these gadgets, we are maximising our exposure to the causes of RSI-type conditions, when we really should be minimising it. This is especially true if you are one of the many people who uses a computer in your daily job. Using a computer for 6-8 hours a day may already be putting your body at risk from RSI. If you add in interaction with some of the above gadgets, you will be increasing that risk. RSI (or cumulative stress disorder) conditions are indeed cumulative in nature, meaning they worsen over time.

Our bodies have never had to intensively utilise devices in such a way ever before in history, and therefore, day after day, they are not functioning as they were designed to do. We maximise our risk of injury by choosing to interact with the above devices on top of work related computer use. While technology has brought amazing benefits, there is a down-side if we are not careful. To compound matters, we may well be maximising our stress levels if we allow ourselves to become enslaved by it 24/7.
It is sometimes difficult to remember a time when these gadgets didn’t exist in our lives, and how we existed without them, but our future ergonomic health may depend on how we manage our exposure to not just computers, but anything that requires repetitive interaction. Every click can add up over time, and the health consequences can, in the worst cases, be severe. Only time will tell, but unless the human body evolves rapidly to cope with the new demands placed upon it, we may be on the verge of a massive RSI epidemic.

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