End the pain – laptops and ergonomics

Idealog: Secrets of Laptop Ergonomics (@idealog.us)

I work on a laptop all day at work and for a couple of hours at home most nights, so being conscious of my posture and taking other steps to prevent strain and RSI are important to me.  Idealog has a good post on some hints for being ergonomically conscious, including:

• Sit with your weight on your sit bones with some weight on your feet.
• Get a portable laptop riser or use a book to raise the height of your display.
• Use a portable trackball at lap level, consider switching hands for mousing.
• Consider using a portable keyboard at lap level.

More tips and discussion are available at the idealog article.

Personally, the steps I take include the following:

• Make sure the brightness is high enough for my environment.  In low lighting, I don’t crank it up all the way to prevent glare and my eyes squinching; in bright lighting, I set the brightness all the way.
• Lift the heels of my hands off the keyboard.  When I rest my heels on the keyboard, it starts hurting my wrists, and I’m sure some ergonomic study has shown this to lead to RSI.  Doing this has the added benefit of preventing me from bumping the stupid trackpad accidentally.

I’m sure there are other sites that have lots of ergonimics tips.  Looking around the Internet I bumped into the International Ergonomics Association site.  Surely they have some ergonomics tips, right?  The best I could find at a glance was the IEA’s achievement of defining ergonomics.  Surely that couldn’t have been difficult.  Well, maybe so, looking at the actual definition:

Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.

 

Derived from the Greek ergon (work) and nomos (laws) to denote the science of work, ergonomics is a systems-oriented discipline which now extends across all aspects of human activity. Practicing ergonomists must have a broad understanding of the full scope of the discipline. That is, ergonomics promotes a holistic approach in which considerations of physical, cognitive, social, organizational, environmental and other relevant factors are taken into account. Ergonomists often work in particular economic sectors or application domains. Application domains are not mutually exclusive and they evolve constantly; new ones are created and old ones take on new perspectives.

What a mouth-full.  Reading that definition is disruptive to my cognitive ergonomics.