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Hardware

Has Anyone Tried the Quill Mouse? 45

Posted by Cliff from the unusual-hardware-designs dept.
Anonymous Coward asks: "Has anyone at Slashdot has heard of or used the Quill Mouse? It's an odd shaped mouse that's supposed to reduce repetitive stress injuries like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome." Rather than grabbing and moving the Quill mouse with your hands, you rest your hand in the Quill's "nook" and move the entire assembly with your arms. Since the palm of your hand is facing inward, you can then click the buttons which have been rotated to match the "nook". The web page says this hand position is less likely to cause RSI than the position a standard mouse requires. Anyone with (or who have used) a Quill Mouse care to comment?
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Has Anyone Tried the Quill Mouse? More

Has Anyone Tried the Quill Mouse?

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  • Repetitive Stress (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @06:52PM (#5857589)
    Here's an uninformed question: is RSS actually cured by changing the position of the hand, or is this treating the symptoms? I've got nothing against selling relief for a problem, but does it really fix the problem?

    • Re:Repetitive Stress (Score:5, Interesting)

      by qengho ( 54305 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @07:38PM (#5858084)


      is RSS actually cured by changing the position of the hand

      Since it removes the "Stress" part of Repetitive Stress Injury, it prevents further damage. Probably won't cure anything, though.

      I was developing problems in my forearm, so I tried the Anir Vertical Mouse [animax.no]. Made a huge difference. After using it for a few years, I can handle a normal mouse again without discomfort. Hey, maybe these things do cure RSI...

      • I guess my question is does the stress just get shifted or does this mouse actually help you overcome the stress involved with RSI (not RSS as I used above).

        • does the stress just get shifted or does this mouse actually help you overcome the stress involved with RSI

          In my case, the pain was caused by overpronation of the forearm. The vertical mouse completely eliminated it. Try this: keep your upper arm at your side and raise your right forearm as though you were going to shake hands, e.g., palm to the left, thumb on top. Now rotate your forearm so the palm faces downward, like when you hold a mouse. Feel the tension along the top of your forearm? That's what

    • I didn't know how much pseudomedical jargon you could fit into a single webpage... Quill really packed it in; might be a new record.

      RSI has little to do with blood flow; it's most often a matter of repetitive trauma. Working with a jackhammer will traumatize you, and cause problems over time... but there is considerable debate in the Orthopedic Surgery community about whether keyboarding etc even causes RSI. Several Orthopedic colleagues I've spoken to are adamant that, based on the literature, typing/

  • i like vertical mouse better (Score:5, Informative)

    by sweet reason ( 16681 ) <mbloore AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @07:05PM (#5857705) Homepage
    i bought an Evoluent Vertical Mouse from ergo [ergocanada.com] recently, and i like it a lot. (that's a canadian store, and the price is in canadian dollars. for those from the US, that may be attractive.)

    unlike the Quill, it has 5 buttons (including the wheel button), and thus easily replaced my MS explorer trackball. using a Quill i would really miss those other two buttons. it also has a smaller footprint, since your hand surrounds it, rather than being surrounded by it.
    • Verticle mouse looks like it has the advantage of being smaller and a closer kin to a regular mouse, but (at least from your link) doesn't look like it offers a left-handed option. This would put it out of the running for me and at least three of my coworkers.
    • Hey, how is gaming on one of these? Compared to a normal mouse, can one "learn" to be equally proficient and accurate with this mouse? I am really interested in this particular one. It is optical, has more buttons, and does seem ALOT smaller. I (and possibly others) would love to know. I am very close to making an order.

  • Gorilla Arm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Boglin ( 517490 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @07:10PM (#5857757) Journal

    While I wish this firm the best of luck, I believe there is a flaw in their system. I remember somewhere about one of the reasons why the touch screen failed (is still not in common use) is that it, like the Quill, relied on the muscles of the upper arm to move the hand around the screen to click (technically touch) the controls. Well, the muscles of the upper armed are designed to provide great force, as opposed to accuracy. The end result was that peoples upper arm got tired far more quickly than the wrist would, and people felt like they had "gorilla arm".

    Now, I have not used this product, nor will I ever; a childhood injury prevents my wrists from rotating in the way necessary to use their mice. Therefore, they may have a perfectly reasonible way of handling the moevments. I'm just worried about their blanket assumption that the shoulder is superior tot he wrist.

    • I was coming in to post something similar, but you did it much more succintly than I.

      I'll not buy a Quill or other vertical mouse. I'd rather just move my fingers when moving the mouse around than my entire arm.

      RSS is a problem, but this just creates other ones. Perhaps a slanted surface for moving the mouse around would be better.

      • Re:Gorilla Arm (Score:2, Interesting)

        by kruntiform ( 664538 )
        You might like to try a graphics tablet. I've got a Wacom Graphire II, and it works well. You do move your fingers, and there is not much repetative motion. You can use it with your hand very relaxed (assuming you hold a pen properly -- many people don't); so it's pretty easy on the hands. There are some bad points: you need a decent level of fine motor control to use it. A lot of that come with practice though. But I always wince when my friend uses my computer because he is likely to accidentally and rand

  • Change Hands (Score:2, Insightful)

    by keynet ( 581695 )
    Some years ago I worked in a really bad setup that caused pain all along the upper arm and through the shoulders and neck. I had to shift the mouse to the left hand because I almost literally could not use my right hand for the task. Not only did the pain go from the right arm, but it has never, after 6 years, appeared in my left arm.

    I suspect the reason is that my right arm, being dominant, applies too much force for the task, which then requires counterforce from other muscles top control the fine movem

    • I second this. I started using the mouse with my left hand and haven't had any more wrist pain.
    • I agree. I also started mousing left handed due to pain and numbness I was having in my right hand and arm. It took a little while for me to gain the precision necessary to draw with my left, but once I got used to it, it was great.
    • I suspect there's some truth to this. I'm left handed, and was using a left-handed mouse set up for a while; it led to RSI problems within six months. I switched back to using my right, non-dominant hand for mousing/touchpading/pointsticking and have had no problems after years of heavy use.

  • Danger Will Robinson (Score:2, Informative)

    by crmartin ( 98227 )
    Changing positions like that may well help, but be warned that the explanation they give is, well, crap. RSI isn't really well understood, but (in the case of carpal tunnel disease) it's pretty certainly not because of lack of blood flow.

    As to the issue about moving the arm rather than the fingers, those of us who are old enough to have had real penmanship classes remember that this is the way we were taught to write, too. After my own bout of RSI (caused by playing rogue for about 36 hours straight duri

  • ExtremeTech has a review... (Score:3, Informative)

    by questionlp ( 58365 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @08:51PM (#5858617) Homepage
    ExtremeTech has a review [extremetech.com] on the Quill Mouse along with a vertical-split keyboard. The reviewer found that the mouse was comfortable to use... but the thing does look funny :)

  • Arguments and Pen Pads . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dausha ( 546002 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @09:12PM (#5858733) Homepage

    Okay, so if I put one ounce of pressure on my thumb tip it is the exact same as ten ounces on my thumb--and ends up being tens of tons a year?

    I use VI in the console and ALT+Tab my way to various different screens, so I doubt I do 10,000 mouse clicks a day; let alone 2 million a year. So, I suppose, in following their arguement, that I don't walk two kilometers on my hands.

    My eyelid blinks once very two seconds, 16 hours a day--or 28800 blinks. That's 10.5 million blinks a year. Again, following their logic, the amount of weight moved is, let's say two grams a blink. Oh, my God, my eyelids lift 21 metric tons! No wonder they hurt looking at their web site!

    And, my hands hurt using a damn mouse, so I use a pen pad. Unfortunately, now I have a scribes callous.

    • Uhm, it takes a force to move something, no matter how small it is. A Newton meter is a Newton meter. It's the force required to move one Newton one meter. So yes, it adds up, whether you like it or not.
  • I have a sideways mouse much like the Quill:
    my wrist stays steady while my entire arm moves,
    with the buttons on the side at a better angle.

    For me, it helps reduce fatigue and tension.
    Downside is that tiny motions are trickier,
    like it's difficult to hit pixels in Photoshop.

    Have you looked at touchpads and rollerballs?
    Cheers, Joel

    P.S. maybe this page will help you? RSI reviews [unl.edu]

  • Yes as a matter of fact... (Score:3, Funny)

    by techstar25 ( 556988 ) <techstar25 AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @09:32PM (#5858842) Journal
    A cool website called Slashdot.org recently had a link to an article at extremetech where it was reviewed along with a vertical keyboard.
    Slashdot's original story about them is here... [slashdot.org]
    Seriously, though, the extremetech article was a good read.

  • yeah (Score:2)

    by GiMP ( 10923 )
    I tried it, but being left-handed.. it caused more RSS than any other mouse. It was very painful turning my left hand to the direction of this mouse and it was very difficult to steer.

    Maybe when they release a left-handed version I'd remotely think about using one of these horrible things (as all right-handed mice are horrible).

    I also think that right-handed mice should be illegal to put into public places without also providing left-handed mice... apparently the ADA disabilitiess act doesn't apply to thi
    • Well, Eric, you could choose to use your right hand, but if the fact that I, being a right hander, tend to write backwards if I "go southpaw", you could mouse around backwards as well.
    • Check the quillmouse.com link in the article. There's a picture of both kinds, left and right. In fact, the left hand one is in the front of the picture and had me thinking for a moment that one had to click the buttons with one's knuckles until I realised it was a photo of two different models. Perhaps they need to stamp a big "L" or "R" on them for folks like you and me.

      • Re:yeah (Score:2)

        by GiMP ( 10923 )
        Last time I saw this mouse, I only saw the right handed version.. In addition to being left-handed, I have extremely poor vision ;)
        • In addition to being left-handed, I have extremely poor vision ;)

          And, were I a lesser person, I'd speculate as to what you might have been doing with that left hand to cause that poor vision :-)

    • When I was having problems with carpal tunnel, I moused with my left hand. It took some time to gain as much control so I could have the precision to draw, but wasn't bad. My dh is left handed and we have the standard mice at home. I don't see what is so horrible about using a right-hand mouse with the left hand. Is it just that it doesn't shape to your hand as nicely? Or that you don't have enough control with your right hand? I'm genuinely wondering what the big deal is.
  • A few years ago, after becoming completely sucked into using the computer for hours at a stretch more or less every day, I began to notice slight twinges of discomfort in my right (mousing) hand. Realizing this was the early stage of an RSI and having read all sorts of unpleasant things about them, I switched the mouse to the left hand; I didn't have quite the same fine control with that one, but for things like surfing and whatnot it didn't matter. Around that time I also bought a trackball, which I intend
  • And pain immediately went away.
    http://www.contourdesign.com
    (say in a singsong voice)
    It *does* turn your wrist, but less so than this one. They have multiple sizes of mice for both left and right hands. They *don't* have a mouse wheel, but the action of using a mouse wheel, that scruntch of your hand, is exactly the problem of ergonomics you should be fixing.
  • Has anyone seen a vertical rollerball mouse? Perhaps that would eliminate the need for upper-arm control, and eliminate the unusual twisting of the arm.

    (I haven't used a regular rollerball, so I don't know if they have other disadvantages)
    • do you mean a trackball? i have an MS explorer trackball (i like the five buttons), which i bought specifically because it doesn't have to lie flat. i can prop it at an angle, or hold it in my left hand, and that lets me keep both my wrist and my arm in comfortable positions. i had found that rotating my arm out to reach a mouse beside my keyboard was a problem for my elbow.

      i'm now using a vertical mouse from evoluent [ergocanada.com] (also five buttons, unlike the Quill mouse), which leaves my left hand free, but does
  • To point a mouse it must be gripped, for things to happen it must be clicked.

    "Gripped" implies holding tightly onto the mouse. I think most people just kind of rest their hands lightly on their mice. If you press too hard it gets all sticky and jams in the mousemat.
    • This is the one problem that I can see with Apple's optical mouse - it is a giant rocking button with two small portions at the side that don't move.

      These are there so that if you click and drag and run out of space you can pick the mouse up and move it back to the middle of the mousemat and continue dragging without releasing the button. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you soon get the hang of it. If you were doing a lof of clicking and dragging and had bad technique it would soon hurt though.

      The
  • This is like the little rubber things they put on school children's pencils when they refuse to hold them correctly. It's just a way to force you to abandon a bad habit. If you don't like using a regular mouse in a way that won't cause you pain, then you won't like using this mouse either.

    People do the weirdest, seemingly unnatural things with their wrist when using computers. I really don't understand where these habits come from. Perhaps it's a lack of training early on? Using a computer keyboard should
    • If you don't like using a regular mouse in a way that won't cause you pain, then you won't like using this mouse either.

      the way i use a regular mouse that causes me pain is to rotate my hand. a vertical mouse means less rotation, so less pain. it is not a matter of habit, it is the way the mouse is built.
      • the way i use a regular mouse that causes me pain is to rotate my hand. a vertical mouse means less rotation, so less pain.

        Ok, I'll buy it. I even basically said that in my post.

        it is not a matter of habit, it is the way the mouse is built.

        Here's where I disagree. You are not moving your wrist because of the way the mouse is built. I cannot think of a mouse design that would force you to move your wrist during use, short of one that straps to the forearm. The use of your wrist is a bad habit, potentia
        • Oh! now i get it! we have misunderstood each other.

          i was refering to the rotation needed to bring my hand more-or-less parallel to the table, to hold an ordinary mouse. my neutral hand position is with the palm at around 80 degrees to the table, so a vertical mouse needs a smaller rotation, in the opposite direction.

          i was not thinking about the wrist motion to move the mouse, which is what you were talking about.
          now that you have pointed it out, i am going to see what changing that motion might do for m

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