An Ergonomic Evaluation Of The Kinesis Computer Keyboard

Title	An Ergonomic Evaluation Of The Kinesis Computer Keyboard
# of Words	741
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.96

An Ergonomic Evaluation of the Kinesis Computer Keyboard

An Ergonomic Evaluation of the Kinesis Computer Keyboard

1. Introduction

     In this information-technology age, everyday tasks are more and more
related to computer.  That ranges from basic jobs such as providing food recipes
for housewives to complicated ones such as analyzing laboratory experimental
data for scientists and engineers.  This popularity of computer means that the
time one has to spend with computer would be a lot more than in the past. Until
now, the computers and computer peripherals in the market have been made
according to the same design as the ones invented decades ago when computers are
used only in large-scale scientific projects or big corporations.  That means
for most people the ergonomic value of these products obviously was not taken
into account when designing them.  Fortunately, at the moment, more companies
are trying to change the way people work with computer by marketing a number of
ergonomic products most notably keyboard, mouse and monitor.  There are
ergonomic keyboards, mice and monitors being released all the time.  The reason
why the focus is on these products is that they are the parts of computer one
interfaces with the most while working with computer. The subject of whether
these ergonomic keyboards, mice, monitors and other products really work
attracts a lot of regular computer users.  Thus, studies dedicated to it have
been done.  This report is based on one of the studies about an ergonomic
keyboard from a manufacturer called Kinesis. This study looks not only on the
effect of the keyboard on the users' body by mean of electromyographic activity
but also on the learning rate of the users changing to this new style of
keyboard.  This is very useful since slow learning rate would lead to the
decrease in effectiveness of work. Introduced in 1868 by Christopher Sholes,
computer keyboard is still the primary data entry mode for most computer users.
With the increase of computer, hence keyboard, usage at the moment, these
problems of the keyboard users known as operator stress problems have developed.
This is a kind of cumulative trauma disorders which is mainly caused by working
excessively or repetitively with the same thing, keyboard, in this case, in the
same position for a long period of time.  This kind of disorder is considered to
be the most expensive and severe one occurring in office environment. This leads
to an amount of alter...

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