Mounting a Trackpad on a Kinesis Advantage Keyboard

My Kinesis Advantage collection is useless as the function keys die and they won't sell you spare parts any more. I got a MoErgo Glove80 (https://www.moergo.com/) which is designed by friends of mine.

It's great. Two independent halves so you could just put a track pad between them. Really low to the ground, the old Kinesii were always quite high off the desk. And THE FUNCTION KEYS ARE PROPER KEYS SO WON'T DIE AFTER 5-7 YEARS!!!!!

Also it's a great keyboard. I recommend the white (clicky) keyswitches.

Reminder that “RSI” isn’t a diagnosis, it just means “an appendage hurts, apparently as a result of repetitive movements”. If you want to effectively treat your “RSI”, it’s vital that you figure out the actual cause of pain/tingling/numbness, which could be: tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, thoracic outlet syndrome, pronator teres syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, arthritis, cervical radiculopathy, or something else (though I would say > 99% of the time it will be one of the aforementioned conditions).

The thing with you techy people is that you love to understand the inner-workings of Rust memory management or how MySQL generates query execution plans, but when it comes to your own health, it’s like “eh let me try this keyboard and see what it does…”. NO. It is unlikely that a simple keyboard or mouse change was the real problem/fix. In fact, you’ll find that switching peripherals or switching your mouse hand only works for so long. The most likely cause of your pain is poor posture. Before you say “oh that’s simple to fix”… it’s not. You have to retrain your muscle memory/brain to keep you in an ergonomic position for the entire workday. It takes months and months of deliberate effort correcting yourself many times an hour throughout the day. But yeah- make sure your keyboard and mouse are at the proper height, your monitor is at the proper height (often it’s too low), and your chair is the proper height (and you’re sitting in it correctly- no slouching!).

Figure out what exactly you have. The approach for resolving tendonitis is very different from that of carpal tunnel syndrome, for example. CTS has become the poster child for “RSI” but it’s not a bad “RSI” to have. You get a quick, outpatient, endoscopic surgery on each wrist and you’re cured. It’s pretty much that simple. Carpal Tunnel Release has one of the highest success rates of all surgeries. It’s comparable to wisdom teeth removal in terms of risk-reward and recovery time (measured in days or weeks, not months).

It sucks but you should do your own research. It takes many hours, but I had to as after seeing 3 orthopedic surgeons and 1 neurologist, they didn’t know what was wrong with me. It was thoracic outlet syndrome, but none tested me for it, asked me questions that would lead them to that diagnosis, and the one I mentioned it to straight up said it couldn’t be TOS because TOS is “very rare”. The symptoms fit though. They fit better than CTS, which these docs incorrectly diagnosed me with. I used to think people who dismissed doctors’ opinions and diagnoses were DUMB, but now I understand their perspective.

At work I have a microsoft natural keyboard, the magic trackpad 2 sits nicely on top of the numpad after hot-gluing some angle-brackets on the sides of the keyboard.

Compared to the kinesis, it’s a cheap and non-noisy (membrane) keyboard, but still retains a decent ergonomic posture.

Ha cool, I do the same but with a Kinesis Freestyle on risers. Been using it for over a year with good results in reducing wrist and shoulder pain.

I did something similar, but just used 2 strips of velcro.