You Might be Thankful for Stepping on this Rat!

If your wrists are hurting from using the mouse too much, Bob Thompson has a rat you may be thankful for stepping on.

Thompson, a computer programmer and inventor from the Propagated Development Group (PDG), realized that switching between the keyboard and mouse was tiresome and extremely inefficient. As he points out on the PDG web page, the process involves six complex steps:

1. Take your hands off of the keyboard
2. Take your eyes off of the monitor to look for the mouse or use your hands to "feel" for the mouse and hope that you don't click by accident.
3. Find the mouse pointer on the screen and move the mouse to the place where you would like to use it.
4. Perform the mouse activity that you wish to perform.
5. Release the mouse and return your hands to the keyboard trying not to hit any keys inadvertently.
6. Resume keyboard activity.

    

To find a better way. all he had to do was look down at his feet, merely resting there under his workstation. "Why not put the feet to use, taking some of the workload off of the hands?" Thompson asked himself. The NIKI (Necessary Instrument for Komputer Input) was born. It is now known as the FootRat

The FootRat is a nine-inch long, four-inch wide, oval-shaped device that sits about two inches off the floor. Underneath the FootRat is an opening in which a standard mouse fits snuggly between two pieces of foam. the mouse cord slips through a slit the front of the FootRat, allowing it to stay in place. The top of the FootRat features a skid-proof surface and a Velcro strap to hold the foot in place.

The FootRat user simply inserts the mouse in the underbelly, turns the device right side up, places a foot on top, and secures the strap over the foot. To move the cursor, the user just slides his or her foot in the desired direction. When I tested the FootRat, I found that only slight movements propelled the pointer across the screen. Therefore, only a small range of motion in the leg and foot is necessary to use this device.

In order to click the left and right mouse buttons, Thompson wrote simple program called TouchTime. The software asks users to choose one function key for emulating the left mouse button and another function for emulating the right mouse button. The software runs on Windows 95, 98, and NT and can be downloaded free from the PDG web page.

Even for an experienced foot-mouser like me, using the FootRat was a

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