The Impact on Musculoskeletal System during Multitouch Tablet Interactions

摘要

HCI researchers and technologists have heralded multitouch interaction as the technology to drive computing systems into the future. However, as we move towards a world where interaction is based on human body movements that are not well documented or studied, we face a serious and a grave risk of creating technology and systems that may lead to musculoskeletal disorders (MSD's). Designers need to be empowered with objective data on the impact of multitouch interactions on the musculoskeletal system to make informed choices in interaction design. In this paper we present an experiment that documents kinematic (movement) and kinetic measures (EMG) when interacting with a multitouch tablet. Results show that multitouch interaction can induce significant stress that may lead to MSDs and care must be taken when designing multitouch interaction.