Researchers Want to Save Your Wrists with a Squishy Take on the Classic Mouse

Researchers from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the University of Melbourne in Australia are addressing a design largely unchanged since the 1960s and Doug Engelbart's wooden prototype — developing a new, flexible computer mouse they claim could help prevent injuries.

"The flat, rigid shape of today's mouse forces the hand into an unnatural position," claims Jose Berengueres, project lead, of the problem the team set out to solve. "Over time, this causes continuous stress on the forearm and wrist. If we want to prevent injury, we need to rethink the design from the ground up. The mouse is long overdue for reinvention. Done right, it could make computing healthier and more comfortable for millions of people."

The design of the mouse dates back to the 1960s and the work of Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center (ARC), in which Ralph Benjamin's 1946 invention of the trackball was flipped on its head to create a device you move along a desk surface to control a pointer. The ear-like buttons and tail-like wire gave it its name, and while the underlying technology has changed over the decades since — moving encoder wheels and a physical ball having long given way to an optical tracking system — the overall shape has not.

That's where Berengueres' project comes in: an entirely new form of mouse design, which is more flexible than current models — literally. An initial prototype dubbed the "Fleximouse" swaps the rigid shell of a modern mouse for a futuristic mesh-like structure that deforms when squeezed. While it delivered on the hopes of a device that can be used with a more natural wrist position — similar in concept to vertical mice, which stand tall to allow for a pistol-grip approach to cursor control in order to reduce wrist strain — it proved too fragile for daily use.

Working with Tony Yu at the University of Melbourne's School of Design, Berengueres' project took a shift in a different direction to create the A-frame hinge mouse. While not a folly vertical mouse, the A-frame design is flexible and adjustable — encouraging a similar "palmar grasp" usage approach to the Fleximouse but in a more robust and easier-to-manufacture form. "As with the so-called vertical mouse," the team explains, "the change from flat to a vertical position reduces pronation and crossover in the forearm."

The biggest issue keeping the A-frame mouse from the market, though: size sensitivity. "One advantage of solid-body mice is that they are far less sensitive to user fit," the team admits. "Having observed that variations as minimal as one centimeter [around 0.4"] cause issues, flexible mice would need to be available in different sizes or be adjustable."

The team's work has been published in ACM Interactions magazine under open-access terms; the researchers have also confirmed an application for a patent on the technology.