SoundBreak - Helps prevent OOS injuries by unobtrusively playing sound files of your choice

SoundBreak 1.0 Description

OOS, RSI, CTS... - These acronyms all hurt you, and can kill your career in these wired times.

Repetitive strain injury, Occupational overuse syndrome, and Carpal tunnel syndrome are all faces of the same malaise. In layman's terms, if you use something too much, you'll damage it.

For those on the coal face of the IT industry, it's endemic, and can mean losing a career when typing becomes too painful to sustain...

What can you do?

A good typing technique makes a huge difference. Touch typing is recommended, and you should use two hands to use a shift or control key combo. I switched to the Dvorak keyboard a while back, both to reduce finger movement, and force myself to touch type.

It is a big help to take frequent 'microbreaks' every 5-15 minutes from what you are doing, move around, stretch, and give blood a chance to flow around the place. You should move your arms away from the keyboard and mouse, focus your eyes to some distant point, and relax.

I wrote this program because I always get too involved in what I am working on to remember to take regular breaks (hours can pass before I remember that I should eat, or go to the toilet...). However, I found every reminder program I tried to be too frustrating and/or intrusive to use for long.

What does the program do?

Every 10 minutes (or whatever you set it to) the program will play a sound to remind you to have a stretch. I use a large archive of sound bites from movies and TV (www.tidalwavs.com is good) - the program picks one at random as the reminder each time to keep it interesting.

The important thing is that this is not intrusive, it does not slow me down, and it works. I resent those programs that measure how much you have moved your mouse, or used your keyboard. All that expends resources that my PC and I could better use elsewhere. SoundBreak just sleeps until it is needed.