Smartfish technologies have announced a new product range, ErgoMotion. It’s an interesting concept and mostly well executed.

An ergonomic setup with all devices set in the same position everyday is not a good ergonomic setup. Change is good. They have taken this idea, and come up with an interesting idea, products that slowly change position/angles automatically. See the video below. Or on their own site.

They say they collaborated with top professionals in the field but they seem to have made the classic keyboard mistake of including a numberpad, which for people with RSI is much more of a disadvantage. See first section in my keyboards post. It’s a wee bit worrying that the quotes in the video are from the engineer and the designer. How about use case comments from rsi sufferers? Great that it looks nice but that’s the last of my worries. Not sure I’m the target market.

Seems like a really good effort at doing something new for ergonomics but I’d like to see a compact, version without the keypad.

Update: Turns out they had already resolved this issue. See update post.

Their mouse is interesting too, and I might check it out at some stage, but again they seem to have approached it from a classic mouse perspective, and added motion. But the base position presents the same problems as a classic mouse, that requires you to twist your wrist slightly, rather than the more natural handshake position of a vertical mouse. So I might hold off and see do they do a version where the base position is more vertical. But because it is so flexible, it might just make up for it. Flexibility is RSI’s worst enemy, so I’ll be keeping an eye on Ergomotion.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under Ergonomics, Hardware, Shopping list. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.