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Lifestyle RSI virtual life

Virtual Insanity

social networking insanityOn a recent 4 hour bus journey, I was fascinated whilst casually watching a passenger in front of me on her mobile phone. She was sitting with a ‘real’ friend next to her and was not of a  juvenile age group.  What amazed me was that she spent the whole 4 hour journey (no exaggeration) typing on her phone’s small keypad communicating with ‘virtual’ friends on Facebook and on the phone’s text messaging system.  This included taking pictures of the scenery out the bus window and forwarding them on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no technophobe and realise that social media is playing a big role in people’s lives these days, but it was perfectly obvious to me that this person lived a virtual life almost all of the time! Her ‘real’ friend sitting next to her was relegated to staring out the window  most of the time, but was occasionally invited to check out a witty comment sent by one of her companion’s virtual friends. The insanity of this is that it shows how we are slowly losing the ability to communicate in any traditional, ie personal form. The new ‘normal’ is becoming the social media way.

So what? I hear you all ask. Well,  aside from the implications for “real” social skills, all of the virtual lives that we are leading are at the cost of our bodies interacting with computers, phones, and other hand held mobile devices nearly all of the time!  Which means we are clicking them and using small repetitive micro movements in doing so. I really fear that our virtual lifestyles will lead to a  guarantee of an epidemic in RSI type conditions, and the debilitating pain that goes with them.

Is it not about time that we questioned the importance and necessity of our virtual lives against the necessity that we will have a healthy future in which we will be able to do perform our work as well as successfully interact with real people?

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Categories
Miscellaneous RSI

Text Messaging RSI Timebomb

mobile phone texting rsiJust came across an old article on mobile phone texting and RSI from 2006. In the article it states that almost 4 million people in the UK are suffering from Repetitive Strain Injuries relating to using their mobile phones for texting.

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

Categories
Ergonomics Miscellaneous RSI

Maximum Exposure to RSI

We live in a technology driven world and seem to spend much of our lives using electronic gadgets. These include:

  • 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?