At best it’s a bad solution, at worst a potential patent infringement

Apple Computer unveiled its first attempt at an ergonomic keyboard at Macworld Expo on January 6, and although the Apple Adjustable Keyboard’s odd looks drew crowds, it also attracted a foul wind of publicity to the company. One hand surgeon claims that it’s barely ergonomic and an inventor claims Apple, fully cognizant of what it was doing, ripped off his patented split-keyboard design.

Life is full of irony. That Apple, of all companies, might have copied someone else’s work certainly brings to mind its fierce legal offense against Microsoft that Apple “owned” the idea of the graphical user interface that was in fact invented at Xerox PARC. (Microsoft has so far prevailed in the lengthy lawsuit, though Apple is appealing.)

Legal issues aside, Robert Markison, MD, a San Francisco hand surgeon and inventor whose curriculum vitae is as long as your arm and who’s done extensive research into the ergonomics of the hand and wrist, says that Apple’s new keyboard “throws a crumb at data entry workers,” and is at best a 10 percent solution to the epidemic problem of repetitive stress injury (RSI) that is crippling record numbers of information workers around the world.

IT ONLY ADJUSTS IN ONE PLANE

One reason Markison rejects the design is because the new Apple keyboard, priced at $219 retail (more than $100 higher than its Apple Keyboard II), is only adjustable in the horizontal plane. A horizontal splitting of the keyboard can only correct ulnar deviation, or the crook in the wrist caused by working on what’s commonly referred to in ergonomics lingo as a “flat slab” keyboard.

However, it does not correct the far more serious problem of pronation — working with the palms down — which stretches to maximum capacity all the muscle-tendon units from the elbow to the hand.

Try this at home. To test this for yourself, swing your right hand up from your waist, perpendicular to the floor, in what’s called neutral position. Then turn your palm down — that’s pronation — and feel the immediate tightness in the tendons in your forearm.

Most of the damage from RSI, says Markison, comes from the repetitive motion of moving the fingers rapidly while the forearm is thus pronated and the tendons stretched to their maximum. “It’s totally inappropriate, inefficient use of muscle tissue, and [tissue] will fail under load and repetition when used in this position,” he says.

DID APPLE INFRINGE, AND HOW?

Many people who have seen the Apple Adjustable Keyboard find the design even more appalling because they believe it was purposely crippled to attempt to avoid a patent dispute with Anthony Hodges, a Mountain View, CA-based inventor who has garnered a steady stream of national press attention since he first began demonstrating his prototype split-and-tilt keyboard called the Tony in 1987.

Asked about the Hodges patent, Apple spokesperson Marianne Lettieri- says Apple is “very comfortable that [the Apple Adjustable Keyboard] is a unique implementation” of an adjustable keyboard. “We would never knowingly infringe on a patent.” During an analyst briefing at Apple before the Macworld launch, keyboard product marketing manager Paul Prébin said that Apple had applied for patents on the Apple Adjustable Keyboard’s design.

Prehistoric, eh? However, in one recent press report, Prébin claimed that splitting the keyboard was “prehistoric,” a design dating back to typewriter keyboards of the 1920s, and was not patentable. One must wonder why, then, Hodges received a patent on a split keyboard, and why Apple is applying for a patent for one as well.

In any case, other inventors have certainly patented various kinds of adjustable keyboards over the years, but the design of the Tony is unlike any we saw in a patent search of prior art. (U.S. keyboard manufacturer Keytronics recently showed a split-and-tilt keyboard at Comdex. On Oct. 14, Hodges says, he served Keytronics a “cease and desist” order concerning the keyboard, informing them of his patent and asking them not to proceed with manufacturing plans.)

A four-year process. Hodges received his patent in July 1986, after four years of trying to satisfy patent examiners that the keyboard’s design was unique; during that time he actually had to build a prototype to show that it would work. The Tony is fully adjustable in two dimensions, both horizontal and vertical, thus it allows a typist to use the keyboard in a position which completely alleviates the ulnar deviation and pronation that cause RSI in typists. In addition, each key can move in three dimensions, allowing the fingers themselves to find their most comfortable typing position.

Markison, the hand surgeon, has no financial interest in Hodges’s work, but over the years has given him both free advice and extensive information about the physiology of the hand. Markison says a soon-to-be-published independent trial of the Tony system shows that when the keyboard is split and tilted, typing effort is reduced by 40 to 70 percent in the forearm muscles. He believes it is the only design he’s ever seen that can actually begin to alleviate keyboard-related RSI.

TONY WENT INSIDE APPLE IN 1987

Apple has had intimate knowledge of the Tony keyboard since 1987, when Hodges first took the keyboard inside the company. He’s taken it there many times since, trying to convince the computer company to license the design and manufacture the keyboard. Jean-Louis Gassée, then head of product development for Apple, told Hodges he thought it was a brilliant design because it started out flat, like a “normal” keyboard, but was then adjustable.

Made in the USA (not) But Gassée wasn’t at Apple much longer after seeing the Tony and Hodges persisted with the keyboard design group. During the past five years Hodges has gained a reputation as something of an ergonomic zealot with, some might add, an overly developed sense of patriotism: he has continued to insist that he would only cut a deal with a company who would guarantee that the keyboard would be manufactured in the U.S. Apple’s keyboards are manufactured by the giant Alps manufacturing company in Japan, and Hodges says Apple was unwilling to have the keyboard manufactured stateside.

(If you’re looking for ironies, chalk up another one: Apple chairman John Sculley seems to be at the right hand of Bill Clinton these days in shaping industrial policy; during the campaign, Clinton strongly favored returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S.)

FREE ERGONOMICS COURSES FOR APPLE ENGINEERS

Hodges says that he’s been showing his invention inside the company for many years in good faith, and has provided many Apple engineers with gratis courses in keyboard ergonomics in the hope that he could sway them to manufacture the keyboard. He claims to have times, dates and records of almost 50 people he’s met with at Apple over the years about the Tony system, including five at VP level or higher. “They’ve stolen the invention from me,” Hodges says of Apple.

Lettieri says, “The Apple Adjustable Keyboard is wholly the result of intensive R&D inside Apple. An entire input device team spent years looking at keyboard theory and design and prototypes.” She could not name the head of the team. On the subject of who Hodges has met with at Apple over the years, she says, “We hold all business discussions confidential, so we can’t confirm or deny any discussions with Hodges. That’s a policy. We aren’t saying [his claims] are accurate, but we’re not saying they’re inaccurate either.”

Kicking itself. Patent controversy aside, Apple must be kicking itself that it ever manufactured the keyboard in the first place. With a megamillion dollar civil suit now pending in New York against a raft of manufacturers of computer keyboards — a suit in which Apple, among many other computer and keyboard companies, is named — it seems a somewhat untimely to begin shipping an “ergonomic” keyboard, especially one that’s getting lots of nasty publicity, when such a product could be construed as a tacit admission that existing keyboards hurt people.

Yet if it is proven that Apple did “invent around” Hodges, it’s an incredibly cowardly way to circumvent one man’s life work, especially the important work of stopping a human injury that’s directly attributable to the use of computers. No matter how you feel about Hodges himself, whether you believe he’s a self-saboteur or a misunderstood patriot, there is a moral imperative at work here. There are no acceptable conditions under which someone has the right to steal another person’s work, whether it’s done “legally” or not. And when there are people who are actually being crippled every day by bad keyboards, there are no acceptable reasons to offer a partial solution when a complete one exists.

Another moral, too. This discussion omits the longer version of Hodges’s story, about why he invented the device and why he believes RSI is mostly ignored because it is a women’s disease — since mostly typists are afflicted and most typists are still women — as well as the many horrors he’s encountered while trying to educate ignorant male executives about the growing epidemic.

Suffice it to say that Hodges knew in 1982, when he first invented the Tony, that RSI was a real problem and would get worse. The technology to significantly reduce keyboard-related RSI has been available since 1986. What are we waiting for? Why don’t we have good ergonomic keyboards? If you’re really determined to look at the bright side, despite the controversy surrounding the product itself, it’s at least somewhat encouraging that a company was willing to start addressing the problem. But it’s incredibly discouraging that the effort is so weak and so late.

In fact, Apple still claims “there is no scientific or medical evidence to show that RSI can be eliminated through keyboard design,” according to Lettieri. “We haven’t said this keyboard can address musculoskeletal complaints.” And of course, according to Markison’s evaluation of the design, she’s probably right.

Anyone who works around computer users knows that keyboard-related RSI is putting young, healthy people on permanent disability every day — disability caused by pain so intense that to pick up a bag of groceries or a child is impossible — yet it continues to get little attention from an industry which refuses to admit its culpability or do anything about it. Aside from whatever atrocities may be visited upon hapless inventors, this is the larger crime.

Denise Caruso