International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology

The International Promotion Agency of Culture Technology (국제문화기술진흥원)
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"Least Gain or Wrist Pain": A comparative study about performance and usability of mouse, trackball, and touchpad

  • Received : 2023.04.05
  • Accepted : 2023.05.20
  • Published : 2023.06.30
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Abstract

The mouse as an input device has undoubtedly brought convenience to users due to its intuitiveness and simplicity, but it also brought unprecedented issues such as carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). As a result, the necessity of alternative input devices that put less strain on the wrist, while still providing the convenience of a conventional mouse, has emerged. Unfortunately, there have been several research about alternative devices to replace a mouse, however, they showed inconsistent results. This study suggests that those inconsistent results may stem from the type and the difficulty of tasks used in previous studies. Therefore, we designed this study to compare the performance and perceived workload of three input devices (Mouse/Trackball/Touchpad) in each condition in terms of task type (Targeting/Tracking) and difficulty level (Easy/Hard). The results indicated that there were significant performance differences and no significant workload differences among the three devices, and the interactions were observed in some conditions. These results can provide users with practical guidelines to choose the optimal input device according to their needs or purpose.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5C2A0309359721).

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