Below is an extract from a recent article in Ability magazine (Winter 2009). It featured RSI expert, Paul Goddard of Keytools.


Repetitive strain injury (RSI) may have vanished from the newspapers as an issue for users of computers – but it's far from disappeared in real life. Is RSI in fact set, swine flu-like, for a second and much more disruptive wave than it did in the 1980s when it first began to be talked about?

“The combination of bad posture and cramped laptop use will inevitably increase the number of people with MSDs (musculo-skeletal disorders) and RSI problems in the future,” says Paul Goddard, of Keytools.

”How come the most common cause of people being off sick is already MSDs?”

“Working in very small spaces like iPod screens, you can easily see how flickering fingers and gesture techniques are going to be heavily repetitive,” warns Goddard. “No doubt we will be hunching over tiny screens and straining our eyes for quite a while yet.”

There are two solutions. One, avoid getting RSI in the first place; two, there are now lots of technologies and products to help if you do start feeling you're in danger or even have to start living with the condition.

Want to avoid RSI, asks Goddard rhetorically? Change your behaviour.

“It's how you work - not the machine - that is putting your health at risk. It's too easy to adopt bad posture even if you have a good chair. If you can develop the habit of checking what you are doing and then doing something to change it, you are half way there. Your body is not constructed to spend long hours sitting so do it less.”

To discuss preventing RSI in your organisation call us on 023 8029 4500.