Product Review: Evoluent Mouse
Disclaimer: My husband bought me the Evoluent Mouse for Christmas and I decided I’d write about my experiences. They didn’t pay me to write this or provide free product.
I’m that coworker whose computer you hate to use. I was diagnosed with a mild case of carpal tunnel last year, and have been trying to prevent it from getting worse. So I requested one of those ergonomic keyboards and now I have a vertical mouse to go with it. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I feel I’ve been able to form a solid option. For scale, I have the small size.
When I first plugged the mouse in, I hated it. The button configurations made no sense to me. I installed the disk that came with it, and was able to easily change the configurations. Even though this is a three button mouse, I use the top two buttons only, combined with a scroll wheel click. Once I did that, the mouse was much more intuitive.
This mouse does have a bit of a learning curve beyond that, however. I wanted to grip the hell out of it at first because of the hand position. This led to some fatigue, but not the pain I had been used to. I think some of the grip issues are because the thumb rest is slick. I mean, super slick. I had to train myself to not try to hold onto that surface for dear life and just let my thumb rest there.
Other than that, overall it works great. Combined with my wrist rest mouse pad to keep my arm in a natural position, my wrist is feeling much better. I used to wear a lightweight brace during the day to alleviate pain and I haven’t had to wear it since. I also haven’t gotten that tingly numb feeling in my fingers since I started using it.
Overall, I find this to be a worthy replacement of a standard mouse if you have chronic wrist pain. It’s a little pricey, but for me it has been worth it.
Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to any of my cowokers whose help I ask for, because now they have one more thing to be frustrated with.
I was diagnosed with severe carpal tunnel syndrome around 14 years old. Recently (about 3 years ago) I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout and my wrists have felt much better! It took me about 3 weeks to be able to touch-type, and 2 months to be back to my normal typing speed. My coworkers steer clear of my computer like it’s cursed!
I can imagine so! Mines just the one with the bump in it and my coworkers hate it!
You could possibly keep a standard mouse plugged in for the occasions that somebody else needs to use your workstation?
It’s infrequent (and fun to watch them suffer, cue evil laugh).