Whether an ergonomic keyboard and a vertical mouse are beneficial is debatable, but it’s been a boon to one user.
I’m no stranger to working from home; in fact, I was doing two days a week at home even before the pandemic forced many of us to strictly avoid the office. So I’ve had a decent home office setup for a long while – a standing desk, a second monitor docked with my laptop and a decent office chair. What I hadn’t bothered with was a dedicated keyboard and mouse, instead using the laptop’s built-in keyboard and trackpad, which worked fine… until over the course of a few short weeks I found my neck muscles and right shoulder flaring up in pain. To be fair, the muscle issues weren’t new – I’ve suffered from chronic muscle tightness of the back for a while. What using the laptop’s keyboard and trackpad did was exacerbate the problem until it became a deep burning sensation in the right shoulder joint. As reluctant as I was to change the setup I was so used to, something needed to be done – and so entered an ergonomic keyboard and vertical mouse into my life. By day three of using both, the burn I was feeling in my right shoulder had all but disappeared. There’s a lot of debate on whether an ergonomic setup is truly beneficial – some swear by it (particularly companies trying to promote these products), while others think they’re overrated. I take the middle path: the keyboard and mouse have not cured my repetitive strain injuries (RSIs) – far from it – but they have made my day-to-day functioning a lot more comfortable and I’ll happily extol the virtues of the ergonomic keyboard and mouse to anyone who’ll listen. I’ll also be the first one to admit that it may not suit everyone. But if one of your new year’s resolutions is to boost the comfort of your home office setup, it’s certainly well worth investigating. The issue with getting an ergonomic keyboard is that there are different types, each with its own pros and cons. Figuring out which one will suit you best isn’t easy, especially when you can’t visit a store to try one. I spent days researching arm and wrist placements on different types of ergonomic keyboards to see which one would (in theory) help the shoulder joint best. I finally chose the Logitech Ergo K860 split wireless keyboard – it’s also the model we rate as the best ergonomic keyboard here at TechRadar. And since I had no clue whether it was the laptop keyboard or using the trackpad that was causing my discomfort, I decided I might as well get an ergonomic mouse too and for that I chose the Logitech MX Vertical wireless mouse.
